Community pharmacists’ knowledge, attitudes, and concerns about POCT in the UAE: a cross-sectional study
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Point-of-care testing (POCT) is increasingly recognized for improving timely diagnosis and disease management. Community pharmacists are well-positioned to support POCT delivery, particularly in underserved settings. This study assessed the knowledge, attitudes, and concerns of community pharmacists in the UAE regarding POCT implementation. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 501 licensed community pharmacists across the UAE using convenience sampling. A validated questionnaire measured pharmacists' knowledge (19 items), attitudes (9 items), and concerns toward POCT. Quantile regression was applied to identify predictors of knowledge and attitudes. RESULTS: The median knowledge score was 8/19 (IQR: 3); only 20.4% recognized POCT use in infectious disease detection, and 21.8% were aware of regulatory requirements. The median attitude score was 8/9 (IQR: 3); 66.4% emphasized the need for communication of POCT results to patients and providers, while 64.7% highlighted the importance of mastering POCT mechanics. Main concerns included accuracy (72.3%) and sample collection (60.9%). Female pharmacists and those dispensing more prescriptions daily had higher knowledge scores, whereas older pharmacists showed lower attitude scores. CONCLUSIONS: Although attitudes toward POCT were generally positive, notable knowledge gaps and concerns persist.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it