Development and Usability Test of Leaflet for Healthcare Professionals: A Case Study of Aspitin and Naproxen

Abstract

Thailand is going to join a regional integration, the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) in 2015. Therefore, has participated in the Working Group on the ASEAN Pharmaceutical Products to harmonize the leaflet. Consequently, the Thai Food and Drug Administration (Thai FDA) has established a guidelines development of leaflets issued on July 3rd, 2013. This participatory study was conducted with the intention of developing the practical guidance of leaflet for healthcare professionals in 4 items followed Thai FDA’s announcement; Aspirin indicating as special and dangerous drugs control status, Naproxen and Naproxen sodium. The study was conducted by citing seven reference sources from October 2013 to January 2014, and then verified the accuracy, precision and Item-Objective Congruence Index (IOC) by three experts. The main content includes ten topics, twenty pages. Then the Usability of the leaflet was conducted followed the Thai FDA’s guidelines in order to ensure that the leaflet can be used for communicating constructive information to consumers. The purposive sampling was applied by random sampling from two persons of each group of health professionals; doctors, dentists, pharmacists, medical technicians, nurses and public health officers. The respondents were requested to answer the 14 questions by reading the information indicating the position of data on the leaflet. The questions can be characterized into three parts, namely drug fact, action required and explanation of action. Then, repeating the test in the new group of samples was conducted. There were totally 96 persons participated in this study. In conclusion, the results revealed that only aspirin as special control status leaflet passed comprehension test. There were non-dominant position, difficult to observe for other leaflets and the questions were not clear. Further suggestion for development of leaflets were to prepare the leaflets in the form of online documents instead of paper in order to provide convenience to access and save more budget.