Azmi Sarriff , Wasif S Gillani , Ghada Abdel Raheem M. Babiker
Objective: In order to explore pharmacists’ perceived practicability, importance, and their competence towards achieving and developing the pharmaceutical care practice, we aimed to develop a scale to predict the trilogy of professional skills.
Methodology: The process of instrument construction and development was carried out in four stages. Validity Phase: The opinions of the lecturers of the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences (USM). Phase criteria of item done by mean and standard deviations with pharmacists at national poison center and postgraduate students of Malaysia. Reliability Phase: The Reliability Test with pharmacists at National Poisoning Center and postgraduate students of Malaysia. Finally Pilot Phase: The pilot test with the pharmacists at Pulau Pinang, Malaysia. Data analysis was done by using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS 13®) for windows, both descriptive and inferential statistics used to present findings of this study.
Results: For section exploring the pharmacists’ perception on their understanding and comprehension of pharmaceutical care, the items means were in range of 1.88 to 3.88 which indicated a midrange sense of disagreement / agreement with all statements. Items with a mean of greater than 4.00 or less than 2.00 indicated and standard deviation less than 1.00 indicated inadequate variability. Items with a mean of greater than 4.00 or less than 2.00 indicated skewness, and standard deviation of less than 1.00 indicated inadequate variability. For the importance scale, the items means were ranged from 2.84 to 3.78 which showed a midrange sense of not important / important in all statements. The data from the 32 pharmacists was used for the internal consistency. The internal consistency coefficient of importance scale was 0.868 and there were 15 items in scale. The modified questionnaire was mailed to 53 community pharmacists and 13 sets were sent to the hospital pharmacists at the General Hospital (GH) of Pulau Pinang.
Conclusion: The findings of study concluded the good internal consistency and reliable tool to assess the relative professional skills of pharmacists involved in either community or hospital base practice.
