The Proprietary Association of Great Britain has made three reseach grants totalling £50,000 for projects investigating patients' use of pharmacies and over-the-counter medicines for self-care.
Just under £20,000 has been awarded to Dr Timothy Hammond, a general medical practitioner from Chichester, for a project entitled "Patients' use of the community pharmacist". The study will assess patients' use of community pharmacists prior to consulting with a GP and assess the outcome of the consultations with the pharmacists. The project will use questionnaires given out by GPs and pharmacists and followed up by a researcher.
The second project on "Self-care and health care seeking behaviour for headache and their relationship to headache experiences and medication use" will be led by Ms Helen Boardman, a pharmacist reseach assistant at the department of medicines management, Keele university. A grant of £8,500 has been made and the study will use a cross-sectional survey of five primary care practice populations.
The third project is entitled "The use of OTC medicine in children in the East Midlands" and will be led by Mrs Sharon Conroy, a pharmacist at the University of Nottingham. She has been awarded £22,000. The study will look at the extent and nature of OTC medicines use in children under the age of 12 years in Derby and Nottingham and attempt to determine the reasons why parents buy OTC medicines. It will also examine how the medicines are handled in the home and identify potential or existing risks.
The projects will take between six months and one year to complete and the PAGB hopes to be able to help the project leaders with publishing the results when they are available.