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Abstract

Background & Objective: Social media have been around for several decades in many different forms. Since 2006, when Facebook website moved to a public site, the way by which social media used was completely changed. In Turkey, over the last few years, we have seen several health professionals including pharmacist using Facebook to create groups. These groups have a number of different purposes. A group may be created to share specific health information and discuss interesting issues. Other groups used to share social activities or public problems and solutions. The study aimed to evaluate the impact of social network information sharing in the knowledge and attitude of pharmacists. Setting & Method: The Facebook social network has been used to create clinical pharmacy group since 6 months. Only pharmacists were accepted as group members. The group was fed by information which includes new drugs, FDA alerts, adverse event report and also drug related problems. Pharmacists were assigned in two major groups, Group A of active pharmacist who becomes a member of our clinical pharmacy group, share and discuss information through the network and Group B who is not a member. A knowledge measurement survey (AMS) was given to both of them. The data analyzed using SPSS Pearson chi-square test (p<0.05). Main Outcome Measures: Acknowledge measurement survey was developed and the difference in the score was used to evaluate the difference between the two study groups. Results: One hundred and forty two pharmacists participated in the study, 34.50% of the participants were a member of our Facebook group and 65.49% of participants were not. 78.87% of participants have only pharmacy Bachelor degree and 21.12% of participants have complete or incomplete postgraduate education. 83.67% of the pharmacists who were a group member have a Bachelor degree, 76.34% of the pharmacist who do not group member have a Bachelor degree. The education level distribution between the two groups was not statistically significant. While 63.64% of the AMS questions were answered correctly in the member group, only 44.09% were answered correctly in the non-member group. Conclusion: The study emphasizes the importance of social network in providing the accurate and fastest information for the daily use of the pharmacists. There is a significant difference in knowledge between the pharmacist who join, share and discuss information on the social media and the one who do not join.

Biography

Email: emine_krts@hotmail.com