Assessment of medication usage awareness among rural population living in resource limited settings

Abstract

Rational drug use is a practice in which patients receive medications appropriate to their clinical needs, in doses that meet their own individual requirements, for an adequate duration, and at the lowest cost to them and their community. Irrational use of medicines results in serious morbidity and mortality. Rational prescription of drugs and rational use of drugs ha s been a concern in both developed and developing countries. The overriding purpose of our study is to evaluate the rural patient’s knowledge about their prescribed drugs and to have an idea about their compliance to their treatment. In this prospective interview based study patient’s medication usage awareness and drug usage problem(s) related to patient therapy was assessed by using a self structured questionnaire. A total of 200 patients living in the rural region of Rajampet, Kadapa District were enrolled. It was found that all 200 (100%) patients were aware about the frequency of their medication and the majority (80%) of the patients knew how they were supposed to administer their medication. It was observed that patients were least aware about the possible side effects (2%) of their medications and the dose of their prescribed medications. Our research study concludes that most of patients lack the knowledge of their medications. So there is a definite need of proper patient counseling by the health care providers like pharmacists to improve knowledge of medication usage among rural patients.