Use of generic medicines: Perspectives of consumers living in urban and suburban areas of Klang Valley in Malaysia
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PurposeIn 2007, Malaysia adopted a National Medicines Policy to ensure access to essential medicines through the implementation of generic medicines policy. Despite the presence of this strong policy, the use of generics among consumers is still low. Studies on perception towards generic medicines and the willingness to choose them are important determinants for the success of the generics policy. The objective of this study was to evaluate perceptions and beliefs regarding the efficacy, safety, cost, and preferences for personal use of generics in Malaysia. MethodA cross-sectional survey using a validated questionnaire was conducted on 405 respondents living in urban and suburban areas in Malaysia. ResultsAlmost 40% of the respondents surveyed had negative perceptions about generics. There was no significant difference in beliefs of consumers about generics for acute and chronic conditions. Only a quarter of the respondents reported receiving information about generics from their health care providers, although the younger generation (25- to 34-year olds) adopted a more proactive approach in communicating with health care providers about generic options. While more than 60% reckoned that Malaysians spent too much money for the prescription medicines and a majority agreed that generics offer a better overall value, surprisingly only less than half preferred to take generics themselves. Mixed perceptions concerning the role of private insurers and the government in providing a standard guideline of generics use was observed. Personal financial savings remained the chief reason of willingness to use generics (70%). ConclusionsConsumers’ perceptions and knowledge about generics in Malaysia is poor, hence, there is a need for education. Health care providers should be educated and reassured about the approval system of generics concerning bioequivalence, and safety. These findings have significant implications in establishing an effective and sustainable generic medicines policy and promoting the practice of generic substitution in Malaysia.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it