Knowledge and Attitudes Towards Self-Medication with Antibiotics Among Health Science Students of Enugu State University, Nigeria

Self-medication with antibiotics is a global public health challenge and it is one of the major causes of antibiotic resistance especially in low and middle income countries. The aim of this study was to assess the knowledge and attitudes on self-medication with antibiotics among health science students of Enugu State University of Science and Technology, Nigeria. The study is a descriptive cross-sectional survey of health science students in Enugu State University of Science and Technology (ESUT). Using a pretested self-administered questionnaire, a total of 599 students were surveyed. The study was carried out from February to March 2022. Ethical clearance was obtained before the study commenced. All the data collected were entered into an excel spreadsheet and exported into SPSS (IBM, Corp.) version 25, a descriptive statistics was done. An inferential statistics using chi-square was used and a p-value ≤0.05 was considered statistically significant. A total of 599 students participated in the study (55.3% females and 44.7% males) and, one-third of the respondents were from the faculties of Health and Allied Medical Science (36.6%) and Basic Medical Sciences (36.2%), respectively while 27.2% of them were from the faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences. The study revealed that there is a significant association between gender and the respondents’ knowledge of self-medication with antibiotics (ꭓ2(2) =39.267; p=0.000). Also, a significant association exists between age and the respondents’ knowledge of self-medication with antibiotics (ꭓ2(4) =15.021; p=0.005). Furthermore, majority (81.8%) of the respondents had good knowledge while some (11.0%) had fair/moderate knowledge on self-medication. The findings of this study show that majority of the students had good knowledge of self-medication with antibiotics.