BHB Newsletter

“BHB’s training to Grade C pharmacy technicians needs scaling up.”

 

Photo: An icddr,b’s research team member is collecting data on a retail medicine outlet where untrained Grade C pharmacy technician works instead of a trained Grade C pharmacy technician

Grade C pharmacy technicians dominate the dispenser profession in retail medicine outlets. To prepare retail medicine outlets for accreditation, BHB has trained 5,059 Grade C pharmacy technicians. To determine the training’s effectiveness, icddr,b compared the dispensing practices of 220 trained and 220 un­trained Grade C pharmacy technicians from 11 districts using direct observation and interviews.

The study concluded that BHB’s training of Grade C pharmacy technicians improved retail medicine dispensing practices in Bangladesh, which suggests the benefit of scaling up the training program.

An important finding of the the study:

Practice BHB-trained dispenser (n=220) Untrained dispenser (n=220) p-value
Whether the clients counselled on Duration of treatment; Type of medicine; Purpose of medicine; Reaction with food, etc. 78.2% 60.9% P=0.000