Community involvement for preventing antibiotic sale in village groceries at Mahasarakham province

Abstract

The Diffusion of innovation model was used to develop communication channels for village grocery owners in order to prevent antibiotic sale in Mahasarakham Province, Thailand. Focus groups were developed to obtain information for establishing Multidisciplinary Perspective Intervention with Community Involvement (MPI&CI) The study assessed the change of antibiotic knowledge of grocery s owner, awareness and perceived attribute to preventing antibiotic sale of community leaders, and the magnitude of antibiotic distribution in village groceries after intervention. Local officers and community leaders were trained in a one-day workshop to employ MPI&CI. To assess the effect of the intervention, the quasi-experimental study was designed by selecting 20 villages in each group. Data from 116 groceries obtained before and after intervention. Antibiotics in groceries significantly decreased (p<.001), from 79.2% to 22.9% in the MPI&CI group after intervention. Knowledge of grocery owner significantly increased (p<.001). Awareness of community leaders increase significantly (p<.05). Using modified poisson regression, groceries in control group were 3.55 times more likely to have antibiotic items after intervention compared to groceries in the control group. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of MPI&CI to prevent antibiotic sale in the village. The study recommended the extension of MPI&CI to other village of TAO to prevent the negative consequences of antibiotic sale in the villages.