Searches were made in August 2012 Our scoping search suggested t

Searches were made in August 2012. Our scoping search suggested that studies carried out before 1990 mainly centred on the perceptions of the pharmacists and customers on the pharmacist’s role and not on actually evaluating interventions.[13] Therefore, only studies that were published from 1990 onwards were considered for this review. Only articles in the English language that were available in the full-text version were included. Articles were excluded if they met any of the following criteria: news articles, editorials and discussion papers; interventions provided by a pharmacist find more but not delivered in the community pharmacy setting;

ongoing studies; non-intervention studies; case reports; conference abstracts; studies focusing on disease management/monitoring that only included participants with an existing diagnosis; and health promotion studies that aimed to change lifestyle behaviour like healthy eating or smoking cessation. A search strategy was developed using the keywords ‘community pharmacy’ and ‘screening’ as shown in Table 1a. A sample search strategy is presented in Table 1b. Studies were identified from electronic databases including: MEDLINE (via Ovid, 1950 to August 2012); EMBASE (via Ovid, 1980 to 2012 week 31); Scopus; International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA); and The Cochrane Library (all six databases). A search of the Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (EPOC) register was also conducted by a Trials Search

Coordinator/Information Specialist from the University Selleck GW572016 of Ottawa, Canada (up to 2010). The reference lists from included studies were also hand searched to identify other potentially relevant articles. Titles of articles retrieved by the searches were screened for relevance by one author (AA). Abstracts of potentially relevant titles were screened independently by two authors (AA and PS) and those the full text of all articles identified as potentially relevant were obtained and screened against the inclusion/exclusion criteria by AA. When there were uncertainties in selecting full text articles for inclusion, a second author (PS or TP) repeated the screening process. Any disagreements were resolved by discussion

and consensus of all three authors. One author (AA) extracted data using a specifically designed and piloted data extraction form. The data extracted included: (1) study features; (2) recruitment (including method of identification, numbers invited and agreeing to participate) (3) participants (sample size and demographic data); (4) interventions (including who delivered the intervention and type of screening); (5) disease being screened for; and (6) outcomes (including participant-, intervention- and pharmacy-specific outcomes). Authors PS and TP each independently extracted data from a 10% random sample of included articles (identified using Microsoft Excel’s random-number generator) to check for accuracy. There was no disagreement between the authors.

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