Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices of Pharmacists Toward Splitting or Crush-ing Oral Solid Dosage Forms in Palestine: Safety and Therapeutic Implications

Tablet splitting and crushing is a widespread practice among health-care providers and patients for increasing dose flexibility, or making tablet parts easier to swallow, or allowing cost savings for medications. However, this practice may be dangerous because some formu-lations and classes of drugs are unsuitable for crushing or splitting and may cause significant problems, especially in drugs with low therapeutic indices. This study was conducted to ex-amine the knowledge, attitudes and practice of pharmacists toward splitting or crushing oral solid dosage forms (OSDFs) in Palestine. This is a self-administered cross-sectional question-naire survey involving 300pharmacistswho work at community pharmacists and hospitals in the West Bank area of Palestine and was conducted during the period May 2013 to August 2013. Data were collected using a pretested questionnaire consisting of four sections and ana-lyzed using descriptive statistics and correlation. A total of 325 questionnaires were distribut-ed and 300 were completed. About 67.3% of the pharmacists had good knowledge. Nearly 69% of the pharmacists had a good attitude. There was a positive correlation (p=0.002, r=0.18) between knowledge and attitude scores among pharmacists. Approximately 83.7% of the pharmacists had good practices. There was a significant difference between practice and non-practice respondents regarding knowledge score (p=0.037). This study has identified knowledge, attitude and practice gaps among health-care practitioners, especially among pharmacists. Therefore, improving appropriate knowledge regarding splitting and crushing OSDFs is required by planning and developing programs for local health education purposes.