Prevalence and Perception of Pharmacists on Dispensing Prescription Only Medication without Prescription in Makurdi, Benue State, Nigeria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Currently in Nigeria, prescription only medicines are supposed to be dispensed only with a prescription. The study aimed to reveal the prevalence of prescription only medicine without a prescription and the perception of community pharmacist in Makurdi, Benue State Nigeria towards the phenomenon. Method: The study was carried out between February–April 2019 using simulated patient approach and administration of questionnaire on the pharmacists. Result: Forty pharmacies were surveyed and 100% (29) of the respondents were willing to dispense prescription only medicines without a prescription. Among the respondents, 93% (27) said they do see up to an estimated 30% of POMs without a prescription daily. While 19.2% (5) of the pharmacists do dispense POM without a prescription, 42.3% (11) said they do so depend on the level of education or prior exposure of the client to the medication. Only 38.5% (10) said they will not dispense a POM without a prescription. Most of the pharmacists, 93% (27) agreed that dispensing POM without with a prescription holds potentials for drug abuse, drug misuse, drug dependence with attendant economic consequences. Conclusion: A vast majority of practicing community pharmacists in Nigeria are willing and do dispense prescription-only medications without a valid prescription; for a variety of reasons. This is against existing Nigerian pharmacy laws and the national drug policy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".