Awareness on proper expired medication disposal among pharmacy staffs in Outpatient Department of Selayang Hospital

This study focuses on the awareness of the pharmacy staffs on importance of proper handling or disposal of expired medications. It was done at Hospital Selayang, Selangor. Our study subject was the pharmacy staffs, including provisionally-registered pharmacists (PRP) and diploma training students attached, ‘pekeija rendah awam’ and ‘pembantu pegawai kesihatan’ working in the outpatient department of the hospital on January 2013. The samples were chosen using the proportionate stratified random sampling with their job position as the stratums to get a more accurate result. Then we gave them a set of questionnaire to fill in. The focus of the study was to evaluate their level of awareness on the importance of proper ways of handling or disposal of expired medication in the pharmacy. Also, to evaluate their knowledge and proper practice of expired medication disposal. Using the information from the 40 questionnaires we managed to collect and analyzed using Microsoft Excel 2007, we obtained the results in the forms of tables, graphs and charts. As we expected, most of them do have high awareness regarding the issue and do feel the responsibilities to properly dispose of expired medications. However, the knowledge and practices are lacking mainly due to absence of proper guidelines.