Pre-pharmacy Students' Beliefs About Taking Medications

Class of 2011 AbstractOBJECTIVES: To assess the attitudes of future health professionals towards taking medication. METHODS: A beliefs about medications questionnaire (BMQ) was passed out to pre-pharmacy students at a pre- pharmacy club meeting on April 4, 2011. The questionnaire utilized a five-point Likert scale with 1 being strongly disagree and 5 strongly agree. The collected data was used to compare with the BMQ scores from the general public available in the Horne et.al. study. RESULTS: Pre-pharmacy students had significantly less agreement with negative statements (mean and SD, 2.43 ± 0.65) than the lay public (mean and SD, 3.75 ± 0.29) (p = 0.029). CONCLUSION: We found that pre-pharmacy students tended to view medication use more positively than the general public. However, more surveys were needed in order to confirm these results. Overall we found a significant difference between attitudes held by pre-pharmacy students towards medication use and attitudes held by the lay public.This item is part of the Pharmacy Student Research Projects collection, made available by the College of Pharmacy and the University Libraries at the University of Arizona. For more information about items in this collection, please contact Jennifer Martin, Librarian and Clinical Instructor, Pharmacy Practice and Science, jenmartin@email.arizona.edu