Drug Labelling information and advertisements: Extent of use as sources of drug information by members of the public in Lagos, Nigeria

Abstract

Drug information is pertinent to promoting rational drug use, drug labels and advertisements are channels through which healthcare professionals, patients, care givers and members of the public get information necessary to make healthcare decisions. This study assessed the extent of use of drug labels and advertisements as sources of drug information by non-healthcare personnel in Lagos, South West, Nigeria. A structured questionnaire was developed and respondents were to indicate how often they obtain drug information from the items listed as possible, drug information sources based on a scale of 1-5. Descriptive statistics was reported as frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviations. Inferential analysis was done by calculation of student t-test and one-way ANOVA as appropriate. P-values less than 0.05 were interpreted as significant. The sources of information were sorted according to the five extracted components, pharmacists were the most consulted source for medicine information with the highest mean score of (3.29), the next most commonly used sources were television (3.26), radio (3.13) and the internet (3.02). Others are literature inserts (3.13) and labels (3.12). A significant difference was found between the components (P<0.05), which indicates that the extent of use is different. Females are more likely to use commercial advertisement sources (P<0.05), those with higher income are more likely to use doctors, Pharmacists, and labels on medicines (P<0.05), while those with low income and unemployed are more likely to rely on free sources such as family members, drug hawkers, and billboards. Members of the public and other non-healthcare professionals rely on the pharmacist and also rely to a very large extent on television, radio, literature inserts, drug labels, nurses and the internet as sources of drug information.