Abstract:

Background: Generic medicines are those the original patent expired and which may now be produced by manufactures other than the original innovator company. And according to World Health Organization (WHO), generic medicine mean a pharmaceutical product that is usually intended to be interchangeable with an innovator product, is manufactured without a license from the innovator company and is marketed after the expiry date of the patent or other exclusive rights (1) and usually are cost-savings as they create competition in the market.

Methodology: The cross sectional study was conducted between 30 June to 12 July 2020, whereby questionnaires were used to collect data from final year undergraduate students and entered in Microsoft excel and analysed by using SPSS. Responses were compared using Chi-squire test.

Results/Discussion: The responses were received from 200 of which 116(58%) medical students, 48(24%) pharmacy students and 36(18%) but about 54.5% of all respondents were exposed to bioequivalence studies. All groups scored very well on the issue concerning the need of more information regarding generic medicines. But surprisingly they scored very poorly on issues concerning efficacy and effectiveness of generic medicines (p<0.007), also they scored relatively poorly on issues of therapeutics equivalence (p=0.104). About 89.7% and 85.4% medical and pharmacy students respectively mentioned that they do need standard guideline for substitution of generic medicines and 87.9% of medical students mentioned that they do need more information on issues pertaining bioequivalence.

Therefor according to the findings of the study it’s obvious that majority of the respondents have deficits of knowledge about generic medicines especially on issue of bioequivalence and misconception about efficacy and effectiveness of generic medicines. Despite the lack of knowledge they tend to understand the importance of generic medicine and therefore they mentioned the need of more information and standard guideline for substitution of generic medicines.

Conclusion: The study portrayed there’s significant lack of knowledge among the respondents on issues of bioequivalence and misconception about the efficacy and safety of generic medicines. But most importantly most of the respondents were eager to learn more about generic medicines due to the fact that they do understand the impact of affordable and cost effective medicine.