Knowledge and attitude of Iranian community pharmacists about the pharmaceutical care for epileptic females

Objective: This study was designed to evaluate the knowledge and attitude of a cohort of Iranian community pharmacists about the pharmaceutical care indexes and drug therapy in female epileptic patients.�Methodology: This cross-sectional study was conducted in Iran (2011) and one hundred and twenty two community pharmacists were randomly selected using clustering method for sampling. A self-administered questionnaire which was originally made by a clinical pharmacy focus group was used. This questionnaire had 10 true/false questions for knowledge assessing (Spearman-Brown coefficient, 0.65) and 19 attitude statements (with Likert scale) about the intention of pharmacists for providing pharmaceutical care for epileptic females (Croanbach�s alpha, 0.802). Face and content validity for both parts of the questionnaire were performed before the study.Results: There was a significant inverse relationship between pharmacists� knowledge on pharmaceutical care for epileptic females and the time elapsed from their graduation date. Considering the minimum passing score of 5, 85% of pharmacists did not have enough knowledge. The range of pharmacists� attitude scores was 35 to 64 and its mean was 46.09. Regarding the minimum passing score of 45, 63.3% of pharmacists had positive attitude to AEDs in epileptic females.�Conclusion: It seems that the pharmaceutical care for epileptic females is a missing part of Pharmacy education. It is highly recommended to pay special attention to this topic in continuing education programs for Iranian pharmacists