摘要：Background
Pharmacists are often the first healthcare professionals that patients contact with their illnesses and requests for medical information, which is enhanced following the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Community pharmacists are expected and required to possess a broad spectrum of knowledge and skills. Self-assessment of these competencies is needed for their self-improvement.
Purpose of the study
To assess pharmacists’ clinical knowledge and practice in the safe use of contraceptives, and to compare the scores obtained by external observation with pharmacists’ self-assessment of their knowledge as well as investigate the significance of preceptorship experiences. Contraceptives was chosen as the subject area in view of high rates of abortions as a means of contraception in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Methods
A questionnaire approach was used. The questionnaire included the following: the first domain contained two case scenarios (safe use of contraceptives), which evaluated clinical knowledge, a second domain in which pharmacists self-assessed their knowledge to resolve cases from the first domain and a third domain that measured the demographics of pharmacists (including experience in preceptorship). Dispensing practice was evaluated in the second domain. The questionnaires were distributed to a convenient sample of 100 pharmacists at the Annual Meeting of Bosnia and Herzegovina Pharmacists. The results were presented as counts (%). The groups (preceptors and non-preceptors) were compared using Mann-Whitney U test, paired assessments were analyzed by Wilcoxon signed-rank test and Spearman’s correlation was used to assess the correlation between variables.
Results
Of the 100 pharmacists invited to participate, 84 completed the questionnaire (84 % response rate). There was no agreement between pharmacists’ real knowledge (average score -
case 1: 2.71,
case 2: 3.3) and their self-assessment (average score -
case 1: 3.77,
case 2: 3.91). There was no statistically significant difference in the actual knowledge of pharmacists (experienced/non-experienced in precepting), while the difference in the self-assessment was significant between these two groups.
Conclusion
Pharmacists appear to overrate themselves, which leads to self-enhancement bias, in which the experience in precepting has some influence. Pharmacists’ capability in performing an objective self-assessment of their clinical knowledge needs to be carefully studied in the future to fully benefit patients.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-021-02864-9.
关键词：Pharmacist; Clinical knowledge; Self-assessment; Case scenario; Oral and emergency contraceptives; Preceptor; Bosnia and Herzegovina
