(348) Educating the Appalachian Community on Commonly Used Over-the-Counter Medications

Objective : Enhance community understanding of over-the-counter (OTC) medications and their proper usage, empowering participants to make informed health decisions.

Methods: The Appalachian region faces significant healthcare access challenges, having among the lowest access to primary healthcare providers in the state of Ohio and the entire country. A local pharmacist will present about OTC medications to an underserved population in southeastern Ohio. In order to increase OTC knowledge and confidence about the content the presentation will include methods to select a medication for different ailments such as colds, fevers, acid-reflux, etc. The change in knowledge and confidence in content will be quantitatively measured through surveys given before and after the presentation. The control group will be the pre-survey and the post-survey will serve to analyze the growth of participants' answers in aggregate based on attendance at the workshop.

Results: Research in progress.

Conclusions: By having a local pharmacist provide an educational session on OTC drugs, we expect to increase OTC knowledge and confidence levels in knowing how and when to use certain OTC medications.