Pharmacy · 6 authors, 5 centres
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A prospective cohort study evaluated a community pharmacy-based post-COVID counselling intervention in Serbia, finding that pharmacist-led self-medication guidance was associated with a reduction in median self-reported symptom severity from 3 to 1 on a 5-point scale across 871 patients.
Fifty-three community pharmacists in Serbia delivered post-COVID counselling to 871 patients between December 2021 and September 2022. Pharmacists attended educational events and provided symptom assessment, counselling, and self-medication recommendations. The most common symptoms were respiratory (51.2%), immunity-related (32.2%), fatigue and exhaustion (30.7%), cognitive (27.9%), and skin, hair and nail changes (27.4%). Median self-reported symptom severity decreased from 3 on the first visit to 1 on the follow-up visit. A total of 26.5% of patients were referred to a family physician, and 69.5% returned for follow-up. Limitations include reliance on subjective patient-reported severity, inability to isolate pharmacist intervention effects from natural recovery time or concurrent physician visits, and lack of adherence monitoring. The study suggests pharmacists can identify and manage a broad range of post-COVID symptoms within the self-medication process, though the observational design precludes causal attribution of improvement to pharmacist counselling alone.
