Medications for Children: A Survey of Community Pharmacists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Seamless and safe discharge of children from hospital requires successful collaboration with community pharmacists, for whom pediatrics is often a small part of their practice. OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to understand community pharmacists' comfort level and confidence in providing care for children. METHODS: We conducted a self-administered online survey of community pharmacists in Ontario, Canada. Respondents rated their comfort and confidence on a scale of 1 to 7 in each of 3 scenarios: oral morphine, prednisone, and amoxicillin. We also evaluated the relationship between participants' comfort level and demographics. RESULTS: We included 622 responses (377 completed and 245 partially completed surveys). A total of 182 participants (48%) were female, 271 participants (72%) had children of their own, and they had practiced pharmacy for a median (interquartile range) of 19 (5-28) years. The percentage of respondents who were comfortable (5-7 on a 7-point scale) with filling the prescriptions as written was 64% for morphine, 58% for prednisone, and 61% for amoxicillin and was not different among the scenarios. Having children was associated with increased comfort (p = 0.02), whereas other demographic variables were not. Compared to the amoxicillin scenario, pharmacists reported being significantly more likely to choose another course of action for prednisone (p = 0.01) but not for morphine (p = 0.25). Although 428 pharmacists (70%) agreed that they maintained adequate knowledge of pediatric topics, 558 (91%) were interested in more education. CONCLUSIONS: Variability exists in the confidence and comfort levels of community pharmacists when dealing with children, and many are not comfortable with the common prescriptions in this survey.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".