Study of Drug Storage in Meshkin Shahr Households in 2014

Storing various medicines at home and their arbitrary consumption without doctor prescription are highly important problems in the world and Iran. Having different medicines especially antibiotics at home may cause poisoning, drug resistance, and other irreversible effects. This study was performed to evaluate the medicines stored at homes in households of Meshkin shahr.
The sampls in this descriptive cross-sectional study was selected based on clustering method. The city was divided into five regions (marginalization, non-marginalization and original slum) and a total number of 500 households were selected for quota within these centers. The amounts of surplus medicines were evaluated based on pharmaceutical form, therapeutic and monetary values.
According to the study, 90 percent of families store medicines at home. The average number of drugs per household was 5.32 with the value of 45390 Rials. The most frequent forms of unused medicines were respectively tablets, injections, capsules and syrups. In terms of therapeutic categories, the most frequent medicines kept at homes were antibiotics followed by analgesics, digestive and nerv drugs.
The results of this study showed that storage of antibiotics is very high at homes which may increase drug resistance. Lack of awareness on use and storage of medicines causes very high costs in communities.