Abstract
Drug and Food interactions (FDIs) can affect the compliance and accomplishment of drug therapy. Community pharmacists (CPs), being most accessible healthcare professionals for patients, can avoid or minimize such interactions through patient's counselling. In this regard, their knowledge and attitude towards FDIs are of utmost importance. This study aimed to ascertain the knowledge and attitude of community pharmacists towards FDIs in a capital city of Sudan. A 33 itemed self-administered questionnaire was used to evaluate the primary objectives. Of 241 community pharmacists, there was preponderance of female pharmacists in the cohort. Pharmacists had poor knowledge about the FDIs and no significant difference in knowledge was seen among the all three groups (p> 0.05). Diary-products and quinolones interaction was the mast frequent interaction observed by the community pharmacists (26.7 %). Interestingly, CPs have good knowledge regarding interactions involving NSAID but have poor knowledge about bisphosphonate derivatives, beta-blockers (metoprolol and carvedilol), lithium, warfarin and Vitamin K containing food interactions. Alarmingly, pharmacists had poor knowledge of drug interaction caused by Sudanese foods. In attitude, majority of the community pharmacists had positive attitude toward patient's counselling about FDIs but pharmacists with experience of more than 10 years used to spare more time in patient's counselling. Conclusively, the CPs with good or better knowledge of FDIs had better attitude toward patient's counselling and vice versa. However, half of the participants are not counselling the patients regarding FDIs in a proper way. The pharmacy administration can play a vital role in facilitating and encouraging pharmacists to access published studies about FDIs, arrange educational programs on FDIs to improve pharmacist's knowledge.