Knowledge, attitude, and perception regarding generic medicine prescription among dental and medical professionals – A systematic review

Abstract

Generic medicine is a pharmaceutical drug which contains the same active ingredients as a branded drug in terms of strength, dosage, route of administration, quality, safety, performance characteristics, and therapeutic use. Generic medicine plays a major role in providing affordable medicines to patients. This systematic review was done to identify the knowledge regarding generic medicine prescription among dental and medical professionals worldwide. The search was performed in four databases PubMed, Turning Research Into Practice database (Trip database), Cochrane Library, and Google Scholar to identify the relevant articles with specific keywords and the time filter was February 2012 to February 2022. Finally we included 11 cross-sectional studies. However, generic prescribing is not very much adopted in India due to a lack of awareness about regulatory standards used in generic drug manufacturing. Based on this, the systematic review found that limited knowledge and negative perception among medical and dental professionals about generic medicine are clearly a major barrier to the implementation of generic medicine.