Pain severities and relieving effect of pain medication in community pharmacy / Shamir Wan Shahril Ridzwan Wan

Community pharmacies in Malaysia offer various types of pain medication for patient with different pain severities. Pain severities level may differ in people with different age, ethnic, pain location, and occupation. Objectives of the study were to identify utilization of different types of pain medication among customer in community pharmacy and determine pain severities level based on respondents' demographic data. Validated Brief Pain Index which consist of 28 items such as level of pain severities, types of pain medication, relieving effect level and demographic data were distributed. Data from 169 respondents were analysed using SPSS version 17. Majority of respondents were males (56.2%) and Malay (57.4%). Knee pain (27.8%)) were highest reported types of pain encountered with most of respondents reported having moderate pain (54.4%) at its worst in the last 24 hour. Celecoxib (15.4%o) and Diclofenac (13.6%) were the common pain medication utilised in community pharmacies. Only 21.3% of total respondents reported to have a complete relief of their pain problem in the last 24 hours by their pain medications while most of respondents reported not completely relief by their pain medication although rated that their pain medication provide high rate of relieving effect. Pain severities of respondents were statistically significant different from pain location and demographic data in terms of gender, age, education level and occupation of respondents as p value < 0.05. For conclusion, This study has shown that respondents attending community pharmacies seek for pain medication have different level of pain severities and different location of pain which mostly having musculoskeletal pain. Proper pain medication utilization in community pharmacies can help to further increase the rate of relieving effect toward patient pain problem.