Community pharmacists are one of the most accessible healthcare professionals and are often served as the first point of contact when it comes to minor ailments and health advice. As such, community pharmacists can play a vital role in a country's response to various preventative and public health measures amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the essential nature of community pharmacy as a health service, community pharmacies are unlikely to shut down in any foreseeable lockdown scenario. It is therefore important to assess the preventative measure directives for community pharmacies that are in place to safeguard community pharmacy personnel from SARS-CoV-2 in the various parts of the world. Upon reviewing the recommendations of 15 selected countries across five continents (Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America, and Africa) on social distancing and the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) in community pharmacies, we found inconsistencies in the recommended social distance to be practiced within the community pharmacies. There were also varying recommendations on the use of PPE by the pharmacy personnel. Despite the differences in the recommendations, maintaining recommended social distance and the wearing of appropriate PPE is of utmost importance for healthcare workers, including community pharmacy personnel dealing with day-to-day patient care activities, though full PPE should be worn when dealing with suspected COVID-19 patients.
The objectives of this study are to examine the factors affecting the intention and actual usage behavior on mHealth adoption, investigate the effect of actual usage behavior of mHealth on mental well-being of the end-users, and investigate the moderating role of self-quarantine on the intention-actual usage of mHealth under the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic situation. The required primary data were gathered from the end-users of mHealth in Bangladesh. Using the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2), this study has confirmed that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, hedonic motivation, and facilitating conditions have a positive influence on behavioral intention whereas health consciousness has an impact on both intention and actual usage behavior. mHealth usage behavior has an affirmative and meaningful effect on the mental well-being of the service users. Moreover, self-quarantine has strong influence on actual usage behavior but does not moderate the intention-behavior relationship. In addition, due to the existence of a non-linearity problem in the data set, the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) approach was engaged to sort out relatively significant predictors acquired from Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). However, this study contributes to the emergent mHealth literature by revealing how the use of the mHealth services elevates the quality of patients' mental well-being under this pandemic situation.
Matched MeSH terms: Quarantine/statistics & numerical data