RESUMEN
Background: Unintended pregnancy has huge burdens on healthcare resources and society. Contraception is essential to reduce it, and pharmacists are usually the first healthcare providers who are asked for advice about contraceptives. Therefore, the study aimed to evaluate future pharmacists' knowledge, awareness, and perceptions of contraceptive methods and assess the factors influencing their knowledge, awareness, and perceptions. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted among senior pharmacy students at four universities. Data was collected over three months using a structured and validated questionnaire. Both inferential (Mann-Whitney U-test and Kruskal-Wallis test) and descriptive analyses were employed. Results: A total of 310 eligible participants completed the questionnaire, and more than half of them (N=172; 55.5%) were final-year students. The Mann-Whitney U-test revealed that final-year students had significantly better knowledge (U= 14,261.5, p<0.002) and a higher level of awareness (U= 13,971.5, p<0.007) than fourth-year students. Interestingly, the Kruskal-Wallis test showed that the type of training (hospital, community, none) had a statistically significant impact on awareness scores (p<0.001). Conclusion: Final-year students had higher knowledge and were more aware of contraception than fourth-year students. Also, community pharmacy training was associated with better awareness about contraceptives . Therefore, future studies should explore the impact of incorporating more targeted contraceptive education into earlier years of pharmacy education to bridge the knowledge gap observed between final-year and fourth-year students. Additionally, research should also investigate the effectiveness of specific community pharmacy training modules on contraceptive awareness.
RESUMEN
A drug dataset containing international proprietary names is essential for researchers investigating different drugs from different countries worldwide. However, many websites on the internet offer free access for a single drug searching service to identify international drug trade names, but not for a list of drugs to be searched and identified. Therefore, it will be problematic if the researcher has a list of hundreds or thousands of drug trade names to be identified. In this project, we have created an International Drug Dictionary (IDD) by curating collected drug lists from open access websites belonging to official drug regulatory agencies, official healthcare systems, or recognized scientific bodies from 44 countries around the world in addition to the European public assessment reports (EPAR) and the DRUGBANK vocabulary published in the public domain. Researchers interested in pharmacovigilance, pharmacoepidemiology, or pharmacoeconomics can benefit from this dataset, especially when identifying lists of proprietary drug names, particularly of multi-national origin. To enhance its adaptability, we also mapped the IDD to the standardized drug vocabulary RxNorm. The IDD can also be used as a tool for mapping international drug trade names to RxNorm. Each drug entity in the IDD mapped to a unique identification number for each entity called Atom Unique Identifier (RXAUI) from RxNorm.
