Reasons for self-medication and its practices among pharmacy staff at Hospital Sultan Ismail Johor Bharu

Self-medication is an important part of patients' behavior in coping with illness and it's also an important self-care practices when individual encounter with common health problems that he or she believe that seeking a doctor is not required. This study focused on the reasons why they use self-medication without seeking their physician or prescriber.
Our study was done at the Pharmacy Department in Hospital Sultan Ismail, Johor Bharu. Our study subject was the employees in Pharmacy Department who were divided into clinical pharmacy background and non-clinical pharmacy background. They were approached and the information regarding the research was clearly explained. A briefing was given about the nature of the study and the procedure in completing the questionnaire.
This study was involved the demographic factors which are gender, ages, race and employment, besides the reasons why they use self-medication without seeking their physician. We manage to collect 60 filled questionnaires, go through it and analyzed the data using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software version 18.0 and Microsoft Office Excel version 2010 to get the result in table and graph form.
41 (68.33%) of the respondents did use self-medication to treat their illness from the total number of respondents which was 60. We hoped that this study will be helpful to the healthcare provider to take this into consideration because most of the people use self-medication in treating their illness.