Irrational Antibiotic Use among Secondary School Teachers and University Faculty Members in Shiraz, Iran

Attitude, and practice of university faculty members and high schoolteachers regarding irrational antibiotic use and self?medication.methods: in this cross?sectional survey, 320 university teachingstaff and 150 high school teachers received a questionnaire thatassessed their knowledge, attitude, and practice regarding the use ofantibiotics and self?medication. the reliability of the questionnairewas assessed with cronbach’s alpha internal consistency coefficientand the results were analyzed with the mann?whitney u test.spearman’s correlation coefficient was used to determine thecorrelation between knowledge, attitude, and practice.results: the questionnaires were completed by 134 universityfaculty members and 308 high school teachers, among whom 35.8%and 47.1%, respectively, reported self?medication with antibioticsduring the previous year, mostly to relieve sore throat. high schoolteachers were significantly better than university teaching staff intheir knowledge about the effects of antibiotics and in their usagepractices. in both the groups, a weak direct linear relationship wasdetected between attitude and practice (r=0.243, r=0.238, p < 0.01)and a weak inverse linear relationship was seen between knowledgeand practice (p=0.22) in the high school teacher group.conclusions: our results showed that self?medication and theirrational use of antibiotics were common among highly educatedpeople in a community population sample in shiraz, iran. therational use of antibiotics may be favored by improving knowledgeabout these drugs.