Parental preferences for generic substitution policies for children in China: a discrete choice experiment

OBJECTIVES: To investigate Chinese parents' preferences regarding generic drug substitution policies for children, to provide references for optimising these policies, enhancing parental acceptance rates of generic drug substitution for children, and improving paediatric medication accessibility. METHODS: A discrete choice experiment was employed, and voluntary sampling was used to select parents with at least one child aged 0-12 years from three cities located in the eastern, central and western regions of China for a questionnaire survey. A mixed logit model was used to estimate preference coefficients for various policy attributes, the relative importance (RI) of these attributes and the acceptance rates of different policy scenarios. RESULTS: A total of 411 participants were included. Except for the generic registration standards, the differences in all other included attributes of the paediatric generic drug substitution policy were statistically significant (p