ABSTRACT

The aim of this study is to assess Turkish community pharmacists' points of view about pharmaceutical care practice in Turkey. A self-administered questionnaire was conducted to community pharmacists who attended “clinical pharmacy and pharmaceutical care continuing education programs” organized by Turkish Pharmacists’ Association Academy (n=385) between 2003 and 2005. Majority of the pharmacists (86.8%) were willing to provide pharmaceu-tical care services and 78.9% considered these services as pharmacists’ duty. Participants listed the major barriers to conduct pharmaceutical care practice as follows: “lack of knowledge of drugs and disease states; lack of technical knowledge of how to provide pharmaceutical care practice; lack of communication with physicians and stationary workload”. Our study indicated that pharmacists were willing to provide pharmaceutical care services and most of them considered lack of clinical knowledge as the major obstruct for providing the services.