ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Pharmacol.
Sec. Drugs Outcomes Research and Policies
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fphar.2025.1616631
Assessing Effect of Online Educational Intervention about Pharmaceutical Promotion. A Pre-post Study among Medical and Pharmacy students from Pakistan
Provisionally accepted
Ali Hassan Gillani1
Hafsa Arshad1Caijun Yang1
Muhammad Arshed2
Naveel Atif1
Kamran Bashir3
Hafiz Muhammad Abbas Malik4
Yu Fang1*- 1Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China
- 2Baqai Medical University, Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan
- 3College of Pharmacy, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Sargodha, Sargodha, Punjab, Pakistan
- 4Faculty of Pharmacy, Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur, Punjab, Pakistan
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Background: Pharmaceutical promotion possesses the tendency to alters the prescribing and dispensing behaviors and pharma companies start targeting the students from undergraduate level.Teaching about the promotion is inadequate and a little research has been done in Pakistan regarding this issue. So, we designed and implemented and online educational intervention on promotion and evaluated its effect on knowledge attitude of medical and pharmacy students.Methods: An online interventional study was conducted among pharmacy and medical students and their pre and post perception and attitude score were evaluated using a questionnaire. The module was developed by receiving information from WHO/HAI module on pharmaceutical promotion. The pre-post median score was calculated for each item. Demographic variation in median score was evaluated by Mann-Whitney test and Kruskal Wallis test and total median scores before and after the module were compared using the Wilcoxon signed ranks test. We analyzed the data by using SPSS version 23.0 for Windows.There is significant modification in most of the perception and attitude items of pharmacy and medical students (p<0.001). There is also significant decrease in the total perception, attitude and median scores of the medical and pharmacy students (p<0.001). In terms of the demographic variations female students tend to show lower perception and attitude score in both the cohort. Also, the medical students from the private organizations showed lesser pre and post scores than those from government medical schools.There is significant decrease in inclination towards the promotion after the module in medical and pharmacy students. It showed the effectiveness of online intervention provided to students. There should be teaching for healthcare students on how to choose and use the independent information source for pharmaceutical promotion.
Keywords: Online, Educational intervention, Pharmaceutical promotion, Medical students, Pharmacy students
Received: 23 Apr 2025; Accepted: 16 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Gillani, Arshad, Yang, Arshed, Atif, Bashir, Abbas Malik and Fang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yu Fang, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.