Iranian Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine

Pharmacists serve as members of both the society and the health care team, which may involve them in activities that could be the subject of ethical query. They can face issues and problems in the workplace that may raise questions as to whether their acts are appropriate, right, just or legal.

This study aims to explore ethical issues from the perspective of pharmacists and to examine their reasoning processes regarding social phenomena such as ethical challenges. Moreover, it explores the ethical decision-making strategies that pharmacists employ when dealing with such problems in pharmacies and in their interactions with people.

This was a qualitative content analysis study. The participants were chosen using purposeful sampling from community pharmacists and the academic staff of the School of Pharmacy at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences. The data were obtained through semi-structured interviews with 20 individuals and analyzed using content analysis approach.

Analysis of the interviews led to extraction of the following six categories: pharmacists' understanding of key ethical concepts; pharmacists' experiences and duties; relationship with other health professionals; the pharmacy as a commercial setting; the difference between the practice of ethics in pharmacy, medicine and nursing from the perspective of pharmacists; and the actual response of pharmacists in confronting ethical problems.  Each of the above-mentioned categories were further divided into sub-classifications describing specific ethical challenges in pharmacy practice

Awareness of ethical issues and professional guidelines is a fundamental part of the education of health care professionals and provides a structure that will enable them to assess ethical problems and make appropriate, justifiable decisions. The findings of this study indicate the need for implementation of professional guidelines and codes of ethics in pharmacy practice to cover all ethical issues

Confidentiality is considered as a principle commitment of all health care professionals. Respecting confidentiality creates and maintains the trust between patients and health professionals.

Patients should be assured that their information will be kept confidential unless there is a persuasive reason. Confidentiality originates from principle of patient’s autonomy, and there is no need to be requested frankly by patient.

All of the patient’s information is naturally secret unless the patient gives consent to disclosure. In this article we aimed at reviewing challenges of confidentiality in pharmacy practice in addition to presenting the national and international guidelines in this regard. The pharmacists as the last link of the treatment team are receiving a wide range of information about their patients. Therefore respecting confidentiality in pharmacy practice should be considered as a very important requirement and it seems that privacy and confidentiality is at the primary rack of ethical and legal issues in pharmacy. Obviously fundamental challenges are existent in the pharmacy which remained unsolved. In this regards all those challenges should be determined, analyzed and practiced. In the paper we introduced some challenges including challenges related to the physical environment, pharmaceutical consultation, patients confidentiality in presence of patients family, etc and presented national and international guidelines which assists in dealing with the challenges.