Development and Validation of Questionnaire for theAssessment of Pharmaceutical Care by CommunityPharmacists in a State in Nigeria.

Objective: This study is to develop and validate a questionnaire for the assessment of community pharmacists’ efforts in the provision of pharmaceutical care. Method: A questionnaire based survey of community Pharmacists was conducted within Anambra State. The questionnaire was constructed in line with the Behavioral Pharmaceutical Care Scale (BPCS) and consisted of four sections/domains namely: demographic and other characteristics of the respondent, direct patient activity/current pharmacy practice at community pharmacy, referral, consultation and instrumental activities and exploring the awareness of pharmaceutical care. Face and content validity, construct validity, factorial validity, and reliability of questionnaire were evaluated. Reliability was established using internal consistencies with Cronbach’s Alpha. Factor analysis used principal component analysis and varimax rotation with Kaiser normalization. Convergent correlation was determined using Pearson correlation. Results: A self administered 25-item questionnaire was developed. Questionnaire evaluated pharmaceutical care rendered by community pharmacists. Ten questionnaires were collected for pilot study while ninety completed questionnaire were retrieved for the validity test. Factor analysis resulted in four domains/factors: demographic and other characteristics of the respondents, direct patient care activities/current pharmacy practice at the community pharmacy, referral, consultation and instrumental activities and exploring the awareness of pharmaceutical care. Cronbach’s Alpha for the whole questionnaire was 0.924, and 0.916, 0.840, 0.992 and 0.949 for the four factors, respectively. Four items used for convergent validity showed convergence between the related items. Conclusion: The questionnaire developed is a reliable and valid questionnaire for assessing pharmaceutical care rendered by community pharmacists in Nigeria. Further research is required to expand this instruments’ robustness. Keywords Community pharmacy, Pharmaceutical care, Pharmacists, Questionnair