The community pharmacists and their practice as health care providers.

The community pharmacists and their practice as health care providers Sr. Director: The pharmacists are probably the health professionals who are closest and most accessible to the patients and the general population 1. Their opinions related to health education have an important impact on the health of the population 2. The pharmacist may play the role of an active health educator by implementing interventions tending to reduce the tobacco habit or to minimizing the risks of AIDS contagion. The characteristics of the pharmacists that implement these interventions have not been identified until now. Within a cross-sectional study carried out on a sample of 150 pharmacies of the NW of Spain, the objective of which was to identify the factors associated with the quality of dispensing 3. We included several items on the interventions of the pharmacist related to health education. The objective of this analysis is to estimate the proportion of pharmacists who carry out prevention activities about tobacco and AIDS and to analyze if these activities are associated with their opinion about health education. Level of agreement with the assertion «The pharmacist must be a health educator» (Likert-like scale 1 to 5) were considered as exposure. This variable was dichotomized: no health educator (1 to 3) and health educator (4 to 5). The presence of «do not smoke» poster, the request to customers to put out their cigarette; the availability of an automatic condom dispenser, and the availability of kits of disposable syringes for drugs addicts were considered as dependent variables. Two new dichotomous variables have been created: tobacco activities (0 = there isn't poster and he doesn't request to customers to put out the cigarette; 1 = at least one activity); AIDS activities (0 = there isn't preservative dispenser and he doesn't dispense kits; 1 = at least one activity). Chi-square and multiple logistic regression were used for data analysis. Of the 150 sampled pharmacists, 4 were excluded. The 84.2% participated. The 69.9% were females, mean age is 42.7 and median 39, the 32.5% smoked and the 18.7% considered that the pharmacist must be a health educator. The proportion of pharmacies with preservative dispenser was 13.2% (95% CI: 7.8-20.6) and that with «Do not smoke» posters was 11.6% (95% CI: 6.5-18.7). The proportion of pharmacists who request customers to put out their cigarette was 19% (95% CI: 12.4-27.1), while 50.4% (95% CI: 41.2-59.6) dispensed kits for drug addicts. …