Abstract:

Introduction: Irrational drug use is a global problem with serious widespread health impacts individually and to the community at large occurring especially to developing countries. Several factors have been traced back as the causative of irrational medications which involves either patient, prescriber or the drug supply system. Despite different interventions to have been brought forward to improve the status of rational medication, yet the indicators of RDU continues to worsen over time. This study will explore the knowledge, attitude and practice of irrational drug use among boarding secondary school students and identifying factors contributing to irrational practice of drugs.

Methodology: The descriptive cross-sectional study involved 8 boarding secondary school following convenient sampling and 400 randomized sample of students was recruited 50 from each respective schools. Self-administered questionnaire was used for data collection in which socio-demographic characteristics, knowledge on general concepts of RDU, attitude towards RDU and practice of rational medication were assessed. The collected data were analyzed using STATA version 13.

Results: A total of 385 students with the mean age of 18 years responded of which 184 were males and 201 were females. 27.02% failed to elaborate what RDU means, 37.15% explained that RDU was the responsibility of either patient or prescriber and 29.87% didn’t know whether RDU can decrease the prevalence of increasing therapy resistance. 52.73% agreed to the idea that using injections in place of tables in treating medical conditions treatable by tables was implication of RDU of whom majority supported the idea due to the reason of quick relief injections provided (48%). 8.05% had positive attitude on stopping medication therapy with the subduing of the clinical symptoms prior completion of the course of therapy while 2.08% showed positive attitude on self-medication without advice from the health professional or diagnosis from the physician despite majority of students (62.08%) purchased drugs without physicians advice or prescription. As much as 18.19% showed positive attitude on using too many drugs to cure a single medical condition. 30.91% never and other rarely adhered to the prescribed and/or dispensed medication while 50.19% prescribed left over medications to other person. A total of 22.86% stopped medication due to common side effects experienced by the medication they took.

Conclusion: The study revealed inadequate knowledge on rational medication despite conceptual high knowledge of RDU. Inconsistency between the knowledge and attitude of the study population with their practice tendency towards irrational medication could be a result of ignorance of the information concerning the drug dispensed or prescribed and poor communication among prescriber or drug dispenser with the student being prescribed or dispensed with the drug.