National Center for Radiotherapy & Nuclear Medicine, Directorate of Oncology, Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, Box 1934, Kumasi, Ghana.
University of KwaZulu-Natal, Discipline of Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Health Sciences, Westville Campus, University Road, Durban, South Africa.
BMC Cancer. 2018 Mar 16;18(1):299. doi: 10.1186/s12885-018-4195-y.
The WHO recognises that community pharmacists are the most accessible healthcare professionals to the general public. Most patients regularly visit community pharmacies for health information and also seek advice from pharmacists with respect to signs and symptoms of cancer. As readily accessible health care professionals, community pharmacists are also in the best position to include cancer-screening initiatives into their practice. Pharmacists are therefore in a good position to raise awareness when they counsel people who buy over-the-counter medication for the control of possible cancer-related symptoms. The aim of this review was to critically appraise evidence gathered from studies that; (1) explore or assess knowledge of community pharmacist on signs and symptoms of cancer, (2) explore or assess knowledge of community pharmacist on cancer screening.
EMBASE (ovid), CINAHL (EBSCOhost) and MEDLINE (EBSCOhost) were systematically searched for studies conducted between 2005 to July 2017. Studies that focused on knowledge of community pharmacist in cancer screening, signs and symptoms were included.
A total of 1538 articles were identified from the search, of which 4 out of the 28 potentially relevant abstracts were included in the review. Findings of the selected studies revealed lack of sufficient knowledge on breast cancer screening, signs and symptoms. Both studies attributed knowledge limitation as the cause of reason for the key findings of their studies.
The selected studies focused largely on breast cancer, which hinder the generalizability and transferability of the findings. Hence there is a need for more studies to be conducted in this area to draw a better conclusion.
世界卫生组织（WHO）承认，社区药剂师是公众最容易接触到的医疗保健专业人员。大多数患者经常光顾社区药房获取健康信息，也会就癌症的症状向药剂师寻求建议。作为易于接触的医疗保健专业人员，社区药剂师也最适合将癌症筛查计划纳入其实践。因此，药剂师在为控制可能与癌症相关的症状而购买非处方药物的人提供咨询时，有很好的机会提高认识。本综述的目的是批判性地评估从研究中收集的证据；（1）探索或评估社区药剂师对癌症症状和体征的了解，（2）探索或评估社区药剂师对癌症筛查的了解。
系统检索了 2005 年至 2017 年 7 月期间发表的研究，使用 EMBASE（ovid）、CINAHL（EBSCOhost）和 MEDLINE（EBSCOhost）进行检索。纳入了专注于癌症筛查、症状和体征方面的社区药剂师知识的研究。
从搜索中确定了 1538 篇文章，其中 28 篇可能相关的摘要中有 4 篇被纳入了综述。选定研究的结果表明，对乳腺癌筛查、症状和体征的知识不足。这两项研究都将知识有限归因于其研究结果的主要原因。
选定的研究主要集中在乳腺癌上，这限制了研究结果的推广和可转移性。因此，需要在这一领域进行更多的研究，以得出更好的结论。
