Pilot Study to Evaluate Patients’ Understanding of Key Terms and Aspects of Antimicrobial Use in a Rural Province in South Africa Findings and Implications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global concern, necessitating the understanding of utilisation patterns and their rationale. Pilot studies have been conducted in a rural province in South Africa to determine the extent of self-purchasing of antibiotics by patients from independent and chain pharmacies. It is imperative to understand the extent of knowledge and concerns of patients regarding the key aspects of antibiotic use and AMR, and potential language barriers, when pharmacists and their assistants are discussing the key aspects with patients. Consequently, the aim was to pre-test a patient questionnaire translated in three native languages building on the findings from the English language pilot. Materials and Methods: The English patient questionnaire (Parts 1 and 2) was translated to Sepedi, Tshivenda and Xitsonga. In total 30 patients were interviewed (5/language for Part 1 and Part 2 respectively) when leaving 10 chain and independent pharmacies. This was followed by interviews with patients to evaluate their understanding of questions and key concepts. Results: Eleven of 15 patients interviewed for Part 1 received antibiotics, including 8 without a prescription. Only independent pharmacies (8/10) dispensed antibiotics without prescriptions. Interviews revealed concerns about antibiotic knowledge and AMR and that certain terms including ‘antibiotic’ and ‘AMR’ posed challenges with patient understanding of the purpose of antibiotics. For instance, one patient self-purchased antibiotics for ‘cleansing’ of sexually transmitted infections. The questionnaires in the native languages were subsequently revised so that explanations for terms, including ‘antibiotic’ and ‘AMR’ will be provided in the main study. Conclusion: Similar to the previous pilot studies, self-purchasing of antibiotics was observed among independent pharmacies, although at varying rates, with similar indications. Continued health literacy education for pharmacists and patients, especially with native language communication, are needed to address current challenges and will be explored in the main study.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".