Investigating the Status of Self- Medication of Children under Five Years Old by Mothers in the Villages of Ardakan

Self-medication in children has turned into an important problem for the health of Iranian society. Because children are more sensitive to the harmful effects of drugs due to their immature physiology. This study was conducted in order to investigate the self-medication status of mothers regarding the diseases of children under five years old in the villages of Ardakan.

This descriptive-cross-sectional study was conducted on 350 mothers with children under five years old in the villages of Ardakan in 2019. Sampling was done by census. The data was collected by a standard five-part self- medication questionnaire. The data was analyzed with spss24and using descriptive statistics and chi-square.

The results showed that 57.82% of the mothers had arbitrarily given medicine to their children. The most important causes of self-inflicted drug use were not having a means of commuting to the city with 92.38%, the road not being open for commuting to the city all year round with 27.89%. Also, cold medicines with 96.88% and antipyretics with 93.77% were the most used medicines. A significant relationship was observed between the status of health insurance coverage and self- medication.

Considering that about 80% of mothers self- medicate and the reasons for many of them are the lack of transportation facilities to medical centers,the improvement and development of routes and roads as well as the fair distribution of doctors and medical services in rural communities seem necessary.