الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Diabetes is a chronic disease, defined as a group of metabolic diseases characterized by hyperglycemia resulting from defects in insulin secretion, insulin action, or both (American Diabetes Association, 2014). According to the International Diabetes Federation (IDF) 2017, about 425 million adults aged 20-79 are diabetic worldwide this number is expected to increase to 629 million people in 2045. In the last four decades, the role of the pharmacist has expanded from a person who was mainly involved in dispensing medicinal products carefully to the patient, to an individual who works alongside with physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals in complicated, extremely specialized practice environment to assure appropriate medication therapy management (American Diabetes Association., 2016). Owing to the scarcity of research on the role of the community pharmacist chronic disease management including diabetes mellitus, this study aims at assessing certain practices of pharmacist regarding diabetic patients using Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) as a framework, which has been successfully used in determining pharmacists attitudes, intentions, and practices concerning different health issues.
This study was conducted on community pharmacists in Alexandria.
A predesigned self-administered questionnaire was used to collect the following data:
1) Personal data
2) Pharmacist’s professional characteristics such as years of experience and qualification.
3) Data about availability of some diabetes pharmaceuticals (insulin, metformin, and sulphonylureas) and monitoring materials (blood testing strips and glucose meters).
4) Community pharmacist’s knowledge about diabetes using diabetes knowledge test, developed by the Michigan Diabetes Research Training Center (MDRC) (University of Michigan, 2015).
5) Community pharmacist’s past practice towards diabetes care using the survey of pharmacist activities in diabetes management after modification (Simpson et al., 2009).
6) TPB constructs:
Intention, attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control of pharmacists regarding diabetes care practices. These constructs were assessed using scales developed by the researcher based on extensive literature review and existing TPB measures.
Results:
The results of the present study can be summarized as follows:
• Only 18.1% of the studied pharmacists had good level of knowledge, while about two fifths (42.9%) of them had poor level of knowledge.
• Concerning practice, only 16.1% of the studied pharmacists had good practice, while about two fifths of them (43.4% and 40.5%) had fair and poor practice respectively regarding diabetes care.
• More than two thirds (69.1%) of the studied pharmacists had high intention to perform some diabetic care practices in the future, while 24.7% had moderate intention, and 6.2% had low intention.
• More than two thirds (68%) of the studied pharmacists had positive attitude towards certain diabetes care practices, while 24.7% had neutral attitude and 7.3% had negative attitude.
• More than half (53.5%) of the studied pharmacists are highly affected by significant others, while 9.4% are low affected.
• More than half (62.1%) of the studied pharmacists had high perceived behavioral control towards selected diabetic care practices, while 7.3% had low direct perceived behavioral control.
• Age, intention and perceived behavioral control were strong predictors to behavior.
• Attending training sessions, attitude, subjective norm, and knowledge were strong predictors to intention.
• While years of experience was associated with a decrease in the likelihood of having high intention towards diabetes care practices.
Based on the findings of the present study many recommendations are suggested and summarized as follows:
• Further research on other diabetic care practices especially those related to type 1 should be done.
• Assessment of hospital pharmacists practice regarding diabetes care should be taken into consideration, as they are in contact with several chronic patients.
• The syndicate of pharmacy should organize educational programs which address community pharmacists to enlighten them of their crucial role in diabetes care.