BackgroundEssential medicines (EMs) are those medicines which satisfy the priority health care needs of the population. Although it is a fundamental human right, access to essential medicines has been a big challenge in developing countries particularly for children. WHO recommends assessing the current situations on availability and affordability of EMs as the first step towards enhancing access to them. Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess access to EMs for children based on availability, affordability, and price.MethodsWe adapted the WHO and Health Action International tools to measure availability, affordability, and prices of EMs. We collected data on 22 EMs for children from 15 public to 40 private sectors’ drug outlets in east Wollega zone. Availability was expressed as percentage of drug outlets per sector that stocked surveyed medicines on the day of data collection, and prices were expressed as median price ratio. Affordability was measured as the number of daily wages required for the lowest-paid government unskilled worker (1.04 US $per day) to purchase one standard treatment of an acute condition or treatment for a chronic condition for a month.ResultsThe average availability of essential medicines was 43 % at public and 42.8 % at private sectors. Lowest priced medicines were sold at median of 1.18 and 1.54 times their international reference prices (IRP) in the public and private sectors, respectively. Half of these medicines were priced at 0.90 to 1.3 in the public sector and 1.23 to 2.07 in the private sector times their respective IRP. Patient prices were 36 % times higher in the private sector than in the public sector. Medicines were unaffordable for treatment of common conditions prevalent in the zone at both public and private sectors as they cost a day or more days’ wages for the lowest paid government unskilled worker.ConclusionsAccess to EMs to children is hampered by low availability and high price which is unaffordable. Thus, further study on larger scale is critical to identify acute areas for policy interventions such as price and or supply, and to enhance access to EMs to children.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12887-016-0572-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The survey of ethno-veterinary medicinal plants was conducted from November, 2014 to April, 2015 at selected districts of Harari Regional State, eastern Ethiopia. The aim of the study was to identify and document medicinal plants and the associated ethno-medicinal knowledge of the local community. Semi-structured interview, guided field observation, group discussion and market survey were used to collect the required data. Informant consensus method and group discussion were conducted for crosschecking and verification of the information. Both descriptive statistics and quantitative methods were used for data analysis. About 46 plant species belonging to 33 families were identified and documented based on the local claims of the plants. Majority plant taxa were collected from the wild (54.4%) followed by domestic once (24%). Among these plant families, Fabaceae, Solanaeceae and Euphorbiaceae were commonly used to treat Equine colic, retained placenta and Black leg respectively. The most frequently used plant parts were reported to be the leaves (37%) and then the roots (30.4%). The condition of preparation was in the fresh form (82.5%) and fresh/dry form (17.5%). Oral administration (65.3%) was the most common route of administration. In conclusion, the participants have a wealth of indigenous knowledge about plant medicines for treating their livestock but, agricultural expansion was the major threats to medicinal plants in the study area. Thus, awareness creation should be done in order to conserve and document the plants.

ObjectiveSelf-medication is defined as use of medicines to treat self-recognized illnesses. It is widely used in Ethiopia. However, its extent of use is unknown among health professionals. This study aimed to assess prevalence and reasons of self-medication with modern medicines among health professionals. A cross-sectional study was conducted on the health professionals, working in the public health facilities. Data were collected from March to May, 2016 using semi-structured questionnaire. Data were entered and analyzed using statistical package for the social sciences. A chi square test was used as test of significance at 95% of confidence interval.ResultsA total of 154 health professionals were enrolled, with 53% were being females. The finding revealed that prevalence of self-medication with modern medicines was 67.5%. Financial constraints (32.5%) and familiarity with medicines (24%) were the major reasons of self-medication. It also showed that self-medication with modern medicines was significantly associated with marital status (χ2 = 19.57, P = 0.00). Analgesics (53%) and antibiotics (36%) were the most commonly used categories of medicines. Self-medication with modern medicines was highly practiced among health professionals. Financial constraints and familiarity with medicines were the two major reasons of practicing.

Background: At household levels drug may be hoarded and re-utilized inappropriately, shared within families and/or outside family and unnecessarily utilized in self-medication. Therefore this study was conducted to assess drug utilization at household level in Nekemte town and surrounding rural areas western Ethiopia. Methods: It was conducted on 844 households' head through interviewing where households were stratified into urban and rural; a household was selected by using systematic random and cluster sampling in the town and rural areas respectively. Results: It was found that prevalence of drug hoarding was 49.9% where urban areas were 1.4 times more likely to hoard drug than rural areas (Adjusted OR = 1.4; 95% CI = 1.02 -1.8) and it was also found that drug hoarding was associated with level of households' education where household heads who had level of education higher than or equal primary were 1.5 times more likely to hoard drug (Adjusted OR = 1.5; 95% CI = 1.04 -2.3). The prevalence of drug sharing was found to be 24.9% where urban areas were 0.4 times less likely to share drugs than surrounding rural areas (Crude OR = 0.4; 95% CI = 0.3 -0.6). Nineteen point five percent of illness episodes were reported from total surveyed households where 36.3% of them were self-medicated with modern medicines. Self-medication with modern drugs was significantly associated with age older than fifteen years old (Crude OR = 0.37; %CI = 0.2, 0.83). Conclusions: Drug hoarding, sharing and self-medication with modern drugs particularly antibiotics are commonly practiced in the community, so they should be avoided through educating general public on drug use so as to minimize of risk of using expired drugs and accidental poisoning; under dose and inappropriate use; and combat antimicrobial resistance.

No abstract