During the fall of 1985, we conducted a survey to evaluate the extent and the scope of pharmacy practice in college health institutions. We mailed self-administering questionnaires to all ACHA member institutions. Responses from 222 institutions (72.3%) showed that 41% of ACHA student health services have pharmacist-supervised drug distribution and control. Thirty-one percent of the institutions have a pharmacy and therapeutics committee. About 34% have an in-house pharmacy with a pharmacist in control. It is clear from this survey that the services of pharmacists are not generally available as part of comprehensive health care delivery in the college health setting. When pharmacists are involved, they are primarily active in the delivery of outpatient dispensing services, with a strong emphasis on the provision of drug information to patients and other health care providers.

National survey of student health pharmaceutical services--1985.

A survey was conducted among college students to determine their assessment of the potential of the pharmacist as a family planning counselor. Pharmacists were seen as an appropriate source of contraceptive information for many contraceptive methods, but few respondents had actually consulted a pharmacist. Pharmacists were viewed as competent to provide contraceptive information by a slight majority of the respondents, but only half indicated they would use the pharmacist as a source of this kind of information.

The Role of the Pharmacist in the Delivery of Family Planning Services to College Students

A Canadian government health committee recommended that pharmacists should be allowed to prescribe oral contraceptives because of their pharmaceutical and medical knowledge about drugs; their active roles in counseling patients about prescribed medication and because of their visibility and accessibility to the public. Several surveys on the attitudes of pharmacists about family planning were conducted in Washington Hawaii Pennsylvania Utah Maryland and Mississippi. The results suggested that pharmacists recognized family planning as part of their practice although some were constrained by religious moral and legal factors. The studies also revealed however that the public do not regard pharmacists as sources of family planning services and the pharmacists themselves do not feel that they have adequate training for such a role. The Mississippi study did confirm that the pharmacists are involved to a certain degree in providing family planning services to the public. The need for inexpensive and effective family planning counseling in the United States had been well documented. By all standards with the exception of formal training the community pharmacist is the best choice for meeting this need. Professional pharmaceutical institutions social and government agencies should utilize pharmacists for family planning services.

The pharmacist and family planning: review and report of a study.

Medical care utilization studies in the past have been primarily oriented toward the use of the health care system; notably physician and prescribed drug utilization. Some attention has been given to the use of non-prescription drugs, and little study has been made of patient symptoms which went untreated. Few studies have been published dealing with the relationship between use of nonprescribed drugs and symptom experience. Knapp, Oeltjen & Knapp' found in their longitudinal study that nearly half of the patients in their study used non-prescription drugs as their only response to an illness episode and 70% used such drugs with no medical contact. In a small study in rural Florida, Murphree & Barrow2 found substantial use of 'patent remedies', most often for colds, constipation, and muscle aches. Johnson et aL3 found that, even among enrollees in an HMO, there was a moderate or strong association between the use of non-prescribed medicines and recent symptoms experience for the following conditions: tiredness, aches and pains, headaches, upset stomach, depression, sore throat-runny nose, diarrhoea+onstipation and headaches. They found some association between such use and reported requests for advice from a pharmacist. Bush & Osterweis4 and Bush & Rabid used the technique of path analysis in a Baltimore study and concluded that non-prescription drugs often served as a substitute for physician care, especially if such care was seen as inaccessible. Non-prescription drugs were likely to be the only treatment when they were used. All of the studies have shown a relatively high rate of non-prescription drug use, with or without other kinds of medical intervention, including a more recent rural study by Gagnon, Salber & Greene6 who found 70% of their sample had used one or more such drugs in a 2-week period. The preponderance of evidence points to heavy use of nonprescription drugs, frequently without other medical care, but the linkages to symptoms and certain demographic factors are still unclear.

Helen Wetherbee

Papers

The pharmacist and family planning: review and report of a study.

The Role of the Pharmacist in the Delivery of Family Planning Services to College Students

Symptoms without medical treatment