Sree T Sucharitha¹, Sreeja V²

¹Associate Professor, Department of Community Medicine, ²Medical Intern, Tagore Medical College and Hospital,Chennai,India.

Address for correspondence: Dr. Sree T Sucharitha,Associate Professor,Department of Community Medicine,Tagore Medical College and Hospital,Chennai,India.

Email: sucharithat2@gmail.com

Introduction: Self-medication is defined as consuming drugs without advice of a physician and is wide prevalent among youth. Smart phone application Whatsapp was introduced in 2009 and is a popular mode of communication among professional course students. This project aims to study the impact of ‘whatsapp’ smart phone application intervention on self-medication practices among professional course students.

Aims & Objectives :To capture the knowledge, attitude and self-medication practices among medical and non-medical professional course students in Tagore Educational Institutions, Chennai and to assess the effect of ‘whatsapp’ smartphone application intervention on self-medication practices among the experimental group.

Materials &Methods :A pre test and post test, was conducted to assess the knowledge, attitude and self medication practices among medical and non-medical students of Tagore Educational Institutes, Chennai. The intervention phase included the design and delivery of educational content on perspectives of self-medication through whatsapp to study participants.

Results :The prevalence of self-medication practice is 83%, 81% and 55% in medical, dental and engineering group respectively. At the endline survey after the intervention to medical group, the prevalence in all the above groups as 80%,50% and 74% respectively

Conclusion :Self-medication is found to be common among medical students.The results demonstrate that there is no significant change in knowledge, attitude and practise of self-medication after intervention using a mobile application.The use and impact of mobileapps for health information communication can be explored in detail with various other health related topics.

Keywords :Allopathy, intervention,medical,prevalence, self medication, whatsapp