Unused and expired drug disposal practice and awareness among undergraduate students from pharmacy and other disciplines: Bangladesh perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Most medicine users are not aware of the safe disposal of unused or expired medicines. The aim of this study was to know the current knowledge of the disposal practices of unused and expired medicines among the undergraduate pharmacy and other disciplines studying in universities located in different areas of Dhaka city, Bangladesh. Methods: This was a descriptive, cross-sectional survey, conducted through face-to-face interviews using a structured questionnaire. Returned questionnaires were double-checked for accuracy. Results: A total of 250 valid questionnaires were returned with a response rate of 100%. Respondents were mainly divided into two categories: pharmacy students (n=150; 60%) and general students (n=100; 40%). Two third of the general students (66%; n=98) and pharmacy students (65.3%; n=66) showed an almost similar response to keeping medicines at home. Overall, the highest common leftover medicines were analgesics (n=181; 27.6%) followed by gastric agents 174 (26.6%). Alarmingly, 85 (34%) respondents usually threw their leftover medicines in the dustbin, however, only very few portions of health science students (8%) have donated their unused medicines to welfare and friends. About 58% of respondents from other disciplines agreed that the necessity of pharmacists counselling people about proper medication disposal is highly required. Conclusion: Gaps exist in everyday drug disposal practices, therefore cost-effective pharmaceutical waste management programmes supported by government regulatory authorities and media campaigns are needed. Healthcare practitioners and community pharmacists should offer training to educate patients on standard medicine disposal practices. Findings from this study are hoped to assist in creating awareness about appropriate drug disposal practices in households and trigger interest and attention among policymakers about formulating relevant regulations.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".