Evaluation of the Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Self-Medication among First-Year Medical Students

Abstract

Objective: This study was undertaken to determine the knowledge, attitude and practice of self-medication among first-year medical students of the Arabian Gulf University, Bahrain. Subjects and Methods: This was an anonymous, questionnaire-based, descriptive study. A prevalidated questionnaire, containing open-ended and close-ended questions, was administered to the subjects. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 12 and the results expressed as counts and percentages. Results: Out of the 134 respondents, 43 (32.1%) were males and 91 (67.9%) were females; their mean age in years ± SD was 18.01 ± 0.78. The respondents’ knowledge about appropriate self-medication was poor, but knowledge of the benefits and risks of self-medication was adequate. The respondents found self-medication to be time-saving, economical, convenient and providing quick relief in common illnesses. Important disadvantages of self-medication mentioned were the risk of making a wrong diagnosis, inappropriate drug use and adverse effects. The majority (76.9%) of the respondents had a positive attitude favoring self-medication. Self-medication was practiced by 44.8% of the subjects. The most common indications for self-medication were to relieve the symptoms of headache (70.9%), cough, cold and sore throat (53.7%), stomachache (32.8%) and fever (29.9%). Analgesics (81.3%) were the most common drugs used for self-medication. The practice of self-medication was appropriate in only 14.2% of cases. Conclusion: Knowledge about appropriate self-medication was poor, attitude towards self-medication was positive, and the practice of self-medication was common and often inappropriate.

Identifying Risk Factors for Incautious Use of Non-Prescription Drugs Among Higher Education Institutions’ Students in Emirates

“…These findings are different from the results of other study related to age group [15] and in consistent with the study related to females were more likely to seek health information than males [12,16]. One can contemplate that higher age group users and females have more responsibilities and being wiser to be conscious regarding the importance of reading the drug information leaflets for enhancing safe and effective use of drugs.…”

“…However, the minimal percentage presented here might be attributed to the fact that the present study only included university students, who may have high awareness about the importance of reading drug information leaflets before ONPD use. This finding is consistent with the previous studies among university students, where reading the drug package insert before use ranged from 72% to 94% among medical students in Bahrain [12,13]. To improve such findings to almost 100%, pharmaceutical companies need to develop drug information leaflets that are more attractive to university students, such as changing the font size to increase readability [14].…”

Self-Medication Practices Among Health Care Professional Students in a Tertiary Care Hospital, Pune

“…The incidence of self-medication practice reported by James H et al [9] in Bahrain was 44.0% whereas, a study conducted in Karnataka [10] revealed 53.0% of students practicing self-medications. The high prevalence of self-medication in India is due to easy accessibility to OTC medicines without prescriptions.…”

Untitled

“…Several studies [21,25,[28][29][30][31] have observed a similar finding in contrast to another work. [27] which stated cold and cough as the most common illness.…”

“…[27] which stated cold and cough as the most common illness. Antipyretics and analgesics were most commonly used among the participants like other researchers found [10,25,27,31] compared to another research [26] where use of antibiotics was the most. Students always prefer to treat their illness quickly to avoid visiting the physicians.…”