STATE OF UNREGISTERED DRUGS IMPORT BASED ON PHARMACISTS' EXPERIENCES IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

Azra Uzunovic* and Anela Galic

ABSTRACT

Background: The legal constraint on the import of unregistered drugs only on drug dealers in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H), nonfunctional legal regulations, and the lack of legal regulation defining the work of international pharmacies aggravate the aspirations and readiness of all pharmacists in primary healthcare to provide the requested unregistered drug. The purpose was to gather pharmacists' experience in procurement of the requested unregistered drug and provide possible solutions (international pharmacy) that would improve the services in this area. Materials and Methods: Anonymous and voluntary survey was conducted among pharmacists in B&H during the January and February 2018. Mean, Frequency Difference Tests, CrossTab, PCA (Varimax Rotation) and logistic regression models, from the SPSS v22 program package were used for analysis. Results: EFA resulted in 6 factors explaining the status of unregistered drugs import in terms of B&H's market. Logistic regresion model factors are ranked as follows: information availability (1.407); needs and justification of the service (1.179); institutional and legislative frameworks (0.742); previous practice (0.335); pharmacy profile (0.106); the readiness of the pharmacist to procure the required drug (-1.226); The main finding shows that the existing model providing import of unregistered drugs in practice has not proved to be the best, due to the lack of knowledge of pharmacists about it, due to nonfunctional legal solutions. Conclusion: Improvement of this service requires improvement of institutional and legal framework and information availability, which in result has improvement of utilization of this service, and ultimately satisfaction for the end users.

Keywords: Unregistered Drug, Interventional Import, International Pharmacy, Experiences.