Role of community pharmacists in enhancing health literacy of culturally and linguistically diverse community members

Abstract

ABSTRACT To ensure there is excellence and equality in healthcare, it is imperative to cater for the needs of increasingly diverse patient populations due to globalisation and migration patterns. Australia has a sizeable population of culturally and linguistically diverse community members who are proficient in a language other than the official national language that is English. Such individuals may have impaired health literacy due to language challenges that may manifest when accessing healthcare. Community pharmacists are often the last point of contact for patients before any medicine is taken. Nearly two-thirds of Australia’s 30,000 registered pharmacists work in 5700 community pharmacies all over the country, providing professional care in over 350 million patient encounters annually. Despite this, a broad search of the literature revealed there has been a paucity of in-depth exploration of the interaction between the Australian community pharmacist and culturally and linguistically diverse community member with low English proficiency. The first two phases of research in this project thus involved obtaining an insight into how community pharmacists were meeting the health and medicine-related needs of culturally and linguistically diverse patients with low English proficiency; the first phase from the perspective of the culturally and linguistically diverse community member with low English proficiency and the second phase from the perspective of the community pharmacist. Among the many findings, one major finding was the need for the development of a resource uniquely tailored to the community pharmacy space that could be utilised to communicate essential medicine-related information, particularly at the point of prescription medicine supply. This finding and studies in the literature, informed the final phase in this project in which a randomised trial was conducted on a research-team developed intervention in the form of enhanced pharmacist-affixed prescription medicine labels with low English proficient, Vietnamese community members. Study results revealed improved comprehensibility of medicine-related information with the enhanced labels compared to currently available labels being supplied by community pharmacists. Findings from this project have profound implications for pharmacist practice and patient safety and may also inform continuing professional development activities as well as vii guidelines and standards for provision of medicines information to culturally and linguistically diverse patients with low English proficiency within community pharmacy.