EXAMINE THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN SELF-MEDICATION, HEALTH LITERACY, AND SELF-RATED HEALTH AMONG UNIVERSITIES IN LAHORE, PAKISTAN

Abstract

The prevalence of self-medication among university students is found to be increasing, due to increased academic stress, peer influence, and easy access to medication. As a result, there is a need to increase access to healthcare services, use telemedicine, and implement policies to limit self-medication. The research aimed to discover the association between self-medication and health literacy and examine self-rated health. This study was based on a cross-sectional research design and used a purposive sampling technique for data collection of n=400 sample size from both public and private universities. The data was collected for about 2 weeks by using a survey method. After the data collection, SPSS was used for regression analysis and chi-square test. Independent variables are health literacy and self-rated health and the dependent variables are self-medication. To measure health literacy, we use the HLQ9 tool (Muscat et al., 2019). A self-administered questionnaire was used to assess self-medication (Alshahrani et al., 2019) and the SRH tool was used to examine self-rated health (Meng et al., 2014). While collecting data from the students, our study reveals that self-medication and health literacy are strongly associated with each other. However, the students' self-rated health and self-medication practices do not have a substantial association. This study has also been effective in providing different theoretical and practical implications, which can help improve the awareness related to adverse outcomes of self-medication.