Patent Medicine Vendors’ Clients: Medicine Use Behaviour

Abstract

SUMMARY AIM: To investigate some medicine use behaviour of Patent Medicine Vendors’ (PMVs) clients including self medication practice and medication sharing behaviour. METHOD: A descriptive, cross-sectional survey was conducted in July 2011, on 361 undergraduate students of the University of Jos, Nigeria who visited PMVs within a month preceding the study. A pretested questionnaire was administered to participating students. Participants responded to questions on demography, and medicine use behaviour. Data were entered into the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 16 to generate descriptive statistics which were represented in percentages. RESULTS: The results showed that majority of the respondents (91.7%) visited the PMVs for self-medication with the common classes of medicines procured by PMVs clients including analgesics (38.4%), antimalarials (22.2%) and nutrition/blood preparations (14.1%). About 78.5% of the medicines sold to PMVs clients were in their original package and only 45.9% of clients reported checking the expiry date of their procured medicine prior to use. Medication sharing behaviour was common (60.2%) among respondents. Although most respondents (70.2%) said they had read a medicine information leaflet in the past, majority of them depended on unreliable sources such as friends/relatives (23.2%), media (10.8%) and the internet (9.9%) for medicine information. CONCLUSION: The study therefore demonstrated that PMV clients are those on self-medication and medication sharing behaviour is high among them.