Professionalism in pharmacy profession: Comparison between Türkiye and Saudi Arabia

The pharmacy philosophy has changed from product-oriented to patient-oriented in the last three decades. And due to the evolution of the medical field and the profound changes in the health system, including the pharmacy profession, the need to value ethics is becoming a necessity through building a system that determines and supports professional ethics; thus, pharmacists become more proficient and aligned with code of ethics. This aim can be achieved by continuously updating the ethical codes, evaluating pharmacists' professionalism, and measuring and incorporating mandatory subjects in the curriculum of pharmacy schools. However, in Türkiye and some Arab countries, the educational and practicing system continued to be product oriented. The main objective of this master's thesis is to shed light on professionalism by discussing its dimensions and finding a tool to evaluate pharmacists' professionalism and compare multiple countries regarding their pharmacists' professionalism. The professionalism assessment tool PAT is used, a 33-item self-evaluation tool that evaluates professionalism through five main dimensions. The participating pharmacists were from fourteen countries, but only Türkiye and Saudi Arabia participants were incorporated for the results and discussion because both countries achieved the required sample size. A cross-sectional data collection method was used, which resulted in 440 pharmacists have accepted to participate in the study by pressing "agree" for the participation consent; only 38.18% of them completed the evaluation to the end, thus being included in the data analysis. According to the collected data, we considered seventy-five percent of our pharmacists are professional according to their score from the 33-item tool. Despite a lot of legal and cultural differences, the Independent T-test and Multivariate analysis of variance MANOVA test have been carried out to reveal no difference between Türkiye's and Saudi Arabia's regarding the pharmacists' professionalism. At the end of the thesis, unprofessional observations in the pharmacy community in Türkiye were mentioned and discussed by the author in the discussion chapter. Recommendations and commentary for the pharmacy community, pharmacy schools, and researchers in the field have been pointed out in the last section of the discussion chapter.