Knowledge and attitude of Iranian community pharmacists about the pharmaceutical care for epileptic females

Objective: this study was designed to evaluate the knowledge and attitude of a cohort of iranian community pharmacists about the pharmaceutical care indexes and drug therapy in female epileptic patients.�methodology: this cross-sectional study was conducted in iran (2011) and one hundred and twenty two community pharmacists were randomly selected using clustering method for sampling. a self-administered questionnaire which was originally made by a clinical pharmacy focus group was used. this questionnaire had 10 true/false questions for knowledge assessing (spearman-brown coefficient, 0.65) and 19 attitude statements (with likert scale) about the intention of pharmacists for providing pharmaceutical care for epileptic females (croanbach�s alpha, 0.802). face and content validity for both parts of the questionnaire were performed before the study.results: there was a significant inverse relationship between pharmacists� knowledge on pharmaceutical care for epileptic females and the time elapsed from their graduation date. considering the minimum passing score of 5, 85% of pharmacists did not have enough knowledge. the range of pharmacists� attitude scores was 35 to 64 and its mean was 46.09. regarding the minimum passing score of 45, 63.3% of pharmacists had positive attitude to aeds in epileptic females.�conclusion: it seems that the pharmaceutical care for epileptic females is a missing part of pharmacy education. it is highly recommended to pay special attention to this topic in continuing education programs for iranian pharmacists