Healthcare Professionals’ Knowledge, Attitudes and Future Expectations Towards Personalized Medicine

Abstract

Aim: Personalized medicine (PM) is a novel approach to diagnose and treat disease. The study assessed the knowledge, attitudes and future expectations of healthcare professionals (HPs) towards PM in Ethiopia. Materials & methods: A cross-sectional survey with primary data and a simple random sampling technique was applied to collect data. Results: Our study revealed from a total of 384 respondents, 98 (25.5%), 146 (38%) and 140 (36.5%) had good, medium and poor knowledge of PM, respectively. However, 172 (44.8%), 185 (48.2%) and 27 (7%) had positive, neutral and negative attitudes towards PM, respectively. Conclusion: Most respondent’s future expectations of PM were positive. Education level had a significant association with attitudes and other sociodemographic variables were not significant for both knowledge and attitude.

Lay abstract

Personalized medicine (PM) treats disease by assessing genetic information, environmental factors and lifestyles of individuals among the population. Questionnaires were mainly used to collect data. Chi-square was applied to check the association of variables and their significance at p-value < 0.05. Our study revealed among the total of n = 384 respondents only 25.5% had good knowledge on PM, 44.8% had a positive attitude towards PM and 34.1% of respondents had positive future expectations to implement PM. Limited knowledge and negative attitudes were associated with a lack of awareness and interaction from healthcare professionals with PM. Healthcare institutions shall create awareness and show the practical application of PM for high risk genetic cases.

Keywords::

• attitudes
• future expectations
• genetic information
• genetic variation
• healthcare
• healthcare institutions
• healthcare professionals
• knowledge
• personalized medicine
• pharmacogenomics

Author contributions

T Admas contributed to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data for the work; and drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and final approval of the version to be published; and agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. A Banjawu: contribution in conceptual design, data collection, analysis and interpretation, writing work draft and revising requests of the manuscript.

Acknowledgments

The researchers would like to thank the healthcare professionals who were willing to fill out the questionnaires and they would also like to extend their gratitude to the health staff of all private and governmental hospitals in Mizan-Tepi town who facilitated the timely collection of this data.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.

Ethical conduct of research

Ethical clearance was obtained from the research coordination team in Mizan-Tepi University.