Community Pharmacists’ Practice Regarding Vitamin D Products: A Simulated Client Method

Introduction: One common method to evaluate healthcare professionals practice is to develop a simulated client (SC) scenario. The present study was designed to assess community pharmacists practice level regarding vitamin D products by an SC method. Materials and Methods: Present study was a cross-sectional survey of 200 community pharmacists. SC scenario was designed and validated by an expert panel. The scenario consists of 22 questions to assess pharmacists practice. This instrument includes four sections, demographic history taking, medical history taking, professional discipline, and clinical judgment, which are scored based on the 20-scoring system in each section. After data collection, an independent T-test was used to compare the mean ± standard deviation. The Mann-Whitney test was used to compare median and percentiles for non-parametric variables. Results: The overall practice score was 19.03 ± 9.08 out of 80. The scores were 0.55 ± 1.43 for demographic history taking, 2.13 ± 2.32 for medical history taking, 10.54 ± 5.38 for discipline, and 5.75 ± 3.87 for clinical judgment. Results showed that the pharmacists vitamin D practice was lower than expected. The main limitation of the current study was the crowdedness of some pharmacies. Conclusion: The SC survey results showed that Iranian community pharmacists received poor scores in technical and professional practice fields.