Storage of medicines and temperature control at community pharmacies in rural district of Sindh, Pakistan: an exploratory cross-sectional study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Medicines are the essential tools for prevention, cure and control of diseases. If these medicines are ineffective then their aftermath can cause wastage of resources. Medicines lose their required effectiveness due to inadequate storage at required temperature. Objective: The objective was to estimate the proportion of pharmacies with high temperature (>25°C) inside pharmacy outlets in two talukas (sub-districts) of district Thatta, Sindh. Methodology: An exploratory cross sectional study design was conducted from August 2013 to August 2014. All pharmacies of the two talukas were approached by doing a census. Descriptive analysis was done to calculate the frequencies and proportions. Results: All pharmacies (n=62) had a temperature of >25°C inside the pharmacies. Medicines were exposed to sunlight in 39 (63%) of the pharmacies and 39 (63%) of pharmacies had refrigerators to keep insulin and vaccines. Median duration of electricity shut downs was 12 hours per day and 11% of the pharmacies had back up power supply. Conclusion: More than a quarter of pharmacy owners were aware about maintaining the required temperature of < 25°C but none of them were maintaining required temperature. Considering the electricity shut down, it is important to make cost effective and long term strategies to maintain the efficacy of medicines. Proper legislation needs to be enforced with continuing training programs for pharmacy owners. Further research is required to explore different ways of maintaining required temperature to ensure the adequate efficacy of medicines.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".