RESEARCH ARTICLE
Self-Medication Practices Among Health Care Professional Students in a Tertiary Care Hospital, Pune
Manjusha Sajith1, *, Sruthi M. Suresh2, Naveen T. Roy2, Dr. Atmaram Pawar1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2017Volume: 10
First Page: 63
Last Page: 68
Publisher ID: TOPHJ-10-63
DOI: 10.2174/1874944501710010063
Article History:
Received Date: 06/02/2017Revision Received Date: 28/03/2017
Acceptance Date: 29/03/2017
Electronic publication date: 31/05/2017
Collection year: 2017
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Background:
Self-medication practice is common among health care professionals due to their professional exposure to drugs and knowledge of treatment of their disease.
Objective:
The aim was to assess self-medication practice among medical, pharmacy, and nursing students in a tertiary care hospital, Pune. Method: A cross-sectional survey was carried out over a period of three months. A self-administered questionnaire was used for data collection.
Results:
A total of 318 students participated in the survey; among them106 were medical, 106 were nurses and 106 were Pharmacy students. Out of the total participants, 52.5% were females. Among them, 280 (87.5%) were practicing self- medication. Most drugs for self-medication were obtained from the pharmacy or drug shops, and the most commonly used drugs were non-steroidal anti- inflammatory drugs(81.2%) and antipyretics (67.6%) and antibiotics (35.0%). However, 112 (35.0%) of health care professional students had received antibiotics without medical prescription in the past few months. Common reported illnesses were fever and chills (62.5%) followed by headache (40.0%) and common cold(35.0%).The main reasons for self- medication was that their knowledge about drugs and diseases helped them (67%) and their health problem was not serious(65%). 40 (12.0%) were against self -medication practice and their reasons were fear of misdiagnosis of illness and adverse effect of drugs.
Conclusion:
Our study concluded that self-medication was practiced with a range of drugs among health care professional students. Educating the students and creating awareness among them may decrease the chance of self-medication practice.
