Rational drug use and affecting factors in individuals applicing to family medicine polyclinic

With the increase in the developments in medicine, more diagnosis and treatment opportunities arise. However, there is an increase in the number of drugs on the market and an increase in the use of drugs. The more useful the drugs are when used appropriately, the more harmful they can be when misused. With this study, we aimed to determine the level of knowledge of rational use of drugs and the factors affecting it. The participants of our study are volunteers aged 18 and over who applied to Tekirdağ Namık Kemal University Medical Faculty Hospital Family Medicine Polyclinic for control purposes or upon a complaint between December 2021 and March 2022 (n:308). The data were collected by asking the participants face to face with the 40-question questionnaire prepared by scanning the literature. In the questionnaire form, there are questions about the socio-demographic characteristics of the patients, drug use characteristics, habits, chronic diseases and there is a 21-item AİK scale prepared by Demirtas et al. A package program called SPSS (IBM SPSS Statistics 24) was used to perform statistical analysis. The knowledge levels of women in AIK were found to be statistically higher than those who have a university or higher education level than those who have primary school education, those who live in the city center and district centers compared to those who live in other settlements, and those who take vitamin or mineral supplements compared to those who do not take vitamin or mineral supplements (p<0,05). Although most of the people who participated in our study consisted of young people and people with high education levels, 17.8% of them were found to have insufficient knowledge of rational use of drugs. At this point, physicians and the state have a responsibility. Necessary training should be planned and presented to the public. In this way, irrational use of drugs can be avoided.