How Do Indonesian Community Pharmacists Manage their Medicines?

Management of medicines in the community pharmacies has been an interesting topic recently. Mostly in Indonesia, pharmacies are not adequately supervised by the pharmacists. Data showed that 67.3% of patients who visited pharmacy were not encountered by the pharmacist. Another research stated that only 55% of pharmacist was available at the pharmacy everyday. As a consequence, poor drugs handling might be one of the problems exists in the pharmacy. A survey carried out in 5 region in East Java (Surabaya, Malang, Madiun, Jember and Bangkalan) started from February to May 2011. A total 360 community pharmacists were selected and they were voluntarily asked 9 questions on the management of medicines by using questionnaire sheet. The objective of this research is to get the profile of medicines management by community pharmacists. 331 respondents were willing to fill the questionnaire. 68.3% of respondents stated that the owner of the pharmacy was not a pharmacist and majority (75.5%) pharmacy employed only one pharmacist.In medicine procurement, consumption rate was the elected method by 43.3% of respondents. 51.1% of respondents chosed distributor as the trusted supplier. Most of the respondents (62.2%) stated that quality guarantee was the prime reason to select drug supplier. When accepting the medicine, 0.3%pharmacists never check expiration date and registration number was always checked by 44.2%. 69%of respondents returned almost expired drugs to the supplier, while 2.5% sold it with cheaper price . High percentage of respondents stated that they had standard operating procedures (SOP) for management process. Serious attention must be pointed to the facts that most of the pharmacist did asset evaluation only once a year and some of them did not possess a standard operating procedure in their daily practices