Progress in practice - The UKCPA autumn symposium was held in Blackpool on November 19-21, 1999
Community pharmacists were in an ideal position to promote sugar free over-the-counter (OTC) medicines, said Mrs ELIZABETH McGOVERN (Greater Glasgow Health Board) who gave the Pfizer award lecture. In addition, they should offer sugar free alternatives (to improve dental and oral health), where possible, when medicines containing sugar were requested.
In an audit to determine attitudes towards sugar free medicine, 100 community pharmacists in the Glasgow area were interviewed. Also, data were collected over two weeks from 10 pharmacies for sales of all paediatric OTC medicines. Customer's opinions were also determined. Recommendations, including a sugar free substitution list, were circulated following the audit and the process was repeated two years later.
A significant increase in the provision of sugar free medicines was seen between the original audit and re-audit, said Ms McGovern.
In the first audit, 35 per cent of pharmacists said that their recommendation, all or most of the time, was affected by the sugar content of a particular product. This increased to 64 per cent in the re-audit. When a customer asked for a product containing sugar, the number of pharmacists who would try to persuade the customer to change to a sugar free product in the same range increased from 45 to 69 per cent. However, if there was no alternative in the range, only 11 per cent (compared with 3 per cent in the first audit) of pharmacists would try to persuade the customer to buy an alternative sugar free brand.
The proportion of sugar free sales increased from 58 to 72 per cent of paediatric OTC medicines. The majority of these sales were paracetamol products. The number of sugar free cough products purchased remained low, at 6 per cent of the total. Ms McGovern said that there were still opportunities for improving the extent of sugar free medicine provision.