The public health dilemma of Self-Medication with Antibiotics: The undergraduate students of the College of Pharmacy in Mosul as an example

Abstract

To evaluate the behaviour of Pharmacy College students as a representative sample of undergraduate students in terms of the use of antibiotics in Mosul city, Iraq. A questionnaire was adopted from previous studies with minor modifications to suit the current study sample and distributed to undergraduate students from all stages of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Mosul, in Nineveh province, north of Iraq. The study sample included 429 students. The results were statistically analyzed using GraphPad prism 7 and Excel 2013. the study showed that 51.28 % (n=220) of the participants practiced self-medication with antibiotics over the past 6 months. Retail pharmacies were the most common source for obtaining the antibiotics (87.4%), followed by the nurse clinics (7.9%), and lastly from the leftovers (4.7%). The main reasons for self-medication with antibiotics were the belief of having good knowledge about antibiotic use, followed by assuming that practicing self-medication with antibiotics would save time and money or due to inadequate improvement following proper medical consultation and lack of the nearby health care providers. The major diseases being treated was URTIs. The most used antibiotic for self-medication was Amoxicillin and to a lesser extent Azithromycin Amoxicillin/Clavulanic Acid and Cefixime. Undergraduate students included in this survey had inadequate knowledge concerning antibiotics and a high rate of self-medication. This study calls attention to the need for focused educational intervention and rigorous authoritarian and governmental ruling regarding the issue of inappropriate antibiotic use and sale in community pharmacies.