Pharmaceuticals safety practices-a comparative pilot study.

INTRODUCTION The safety of medicine is essential for the safety of patients. Inappropriate drug storage, expiration dates, sharing prescription drugs, self medication habits and misuse of some drugs are contributing factors affecting medication safety. One or more of these factors may lead to serious health complications and even death. OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to highlight the common errors and pharmaceutical malpractices that people usually engage in on a daily basis and to correlate these to culture, gender and educational levels. This may spread awareness in an easy and understandable manner and provide certain guidelines to drug consumers ensuring that pharmaceutical preparations are used correctly and safely. METHODS Two hundred questionnaires were randomly distributed in two countries; Saudi Arabia and India. The collected data were statistically analyzed. OUTCOMES AND CONCLUSION Results showed that alarming percentages of various participants were using pharmaceuticals inappropriately due to carelessness, unawareness or intentional mistakes. Therefore, active participation by health care professionals is essential for the prevention of drug misuse. Increasing population awareness about self medication, products expiration, pharmaceuticals labels and optimum storage conditions would minimize the adverse effects and may even be life saving.