Exploring knowledge and attitudes towards counselling about vitamin supplements in Jordanian community pharmacies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
UNLABELLED: The use of multivitamins within a pharmaceutical setting has been the subject of considerable debate. OBJECTIVE: This research aimed to provide a platform for assessing and evaluating knowledge, attitudes and professional practices of Jordanian community pharmacists in counselling patients about the safe consumption of vitamins. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted between October 2009 and May 2010. Data collection was carried out using a 44-item semi-structured self-administrated questionnaire. SETTING: Community pharmacies in Amman with target sample of 400 pharmacists. RESULTS: A total of 388 pharmacists participated in this study. The majority (77.8%) of pharmacists believed that a balanced diet is more achievable by eating healthily than by vitamins supplements. 78.1% of participants believed that vitamins deficiency would not shorten life spans, while 80.7% agreed that vitamin supplements could be toxic or might contain unlabelled harmful ingredients. Less than half of pharmacists were aware that some antioxidant vitamins have been verified to be of unproven value, or may even cause cancer. While over 80% of pharmacists would recommend vitamins on a regular basis without prescription, the majority agreed that counselling on vitamin supplements is part of their role in pharmaceutical care (93.3%), in addition to providing relevant information to other healthcare professionals (78.4%). Moreover, responses to specific knowledge questions, such as the interactions of vitamins with drugs or the recommended dietary allowance of vitamins for infants, children, and pregnant women, were negative. Furthermore, only a minority of pharmacists would recheck the accuracy of dose regimens in prescriptions and symptoms of true vitamins deficiency or would follow up patients to record any consequences of vitamins consumption. CONCLUSIONS: The questionnaire revealed satisfactory awareness of community pharmacists about their role in counselling; however, further programmes to update their knowledge are mandatory to emphasise the importance of vitamin supplements as part of complementary medicine, and their exclusion from being considered as merely over the counter (OTC) products.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".