What’s your cure?

There are so many medicines on Ukraine’s pharmaceutical market today that you often hesitate which of the producers is to be trusted and preferred. But for many of our compatriots, this question is sometimes not so important. More often then not, Ukrainians look at the price, not the quality or the desired effect, of a medicament. Almost half of the Ukrainians ask doctors to prescribe them some cheaper analogues of the original preparations. This pushes to the background such a criterion as personal health and the chance of a speedier and full recovery. This was confirmed by GFK Ukraine experts who have conducted a survey at the request of the STADA CIS holding company. The random sample was 1,000 Ukrainians from all regions of Ukraine. The survey’s aim was to find out how the Ukrainians assess the quality of medicaments, whether they trust doctors’ advice, and what criteria they are guided by when choosing a medicine.

The survey results showed that Ukrainians assess the quality of medicines on the basis of the previous experience of using them (almost a half of the polled answered like this). The price of medicines is important in this case for only 15 percent of the respondents. Interestingly, price proved to be the most essential factor for residents of Kyiv: 26 percent against 6.4 percent in the central region. The producing country and company have a lesser effect on quality assessment (11.8 and 10.7 percent, respectively).

The survey also found the degree to which Ukrainians trust their doctor: 41 percent of the respondents are inclined to trust professional medicos and a mere four percent do not heed doctor’s advice and do not follow prescriptions. The poll showed that the decisive criterion for Ukrainian consumers in choosing a medicament is recommendation of a doctor or a pharmacist (47.3 percent), while the price of a package is the second most important factor. Coming third, fourth and fifth are the cost of a treatment course, popularity of the medicament, and popularity of the producing company, respectively. The duration of a treatment course has the least effect on the choice of a medicine: a third of the respondents put this category at the very bottom of the list.

“We are studying the market because it is important for us to know what our buyers are guided by when they purchase medications. We have been satisfying the need of Ukrainians in modern European-quality preparations at a reasonable price for several years now. It may be this factor that allowed us to show a 64-percent and a 15-percent sales rise in hryvnias and euros, respectively, in 2009,” says Stanislav Diachenko, head of the STADA CIS office in Ukraine.

Also of interest is a regional breakdown of selection criteria. For example, residents of Kyiv and the eastern region put the price of a package to the first place, while those of the northern, western, central, and southern regions consider doctor’s advice the decisive factor. The respondents ranked selection criteria in the same way, irrespective of age and gender. As expected, poorer people put package price to the fore, while the well-to-do place this criterion second after doctor’s advice, which means that, irrespective of the living standards, Ukrainians are careful about their finances.

A no less important factor in the selection of a medicine is its quality. Incidentally, quality assessment criteria are rather subjective. For instance, almost a half of the respondents are inclined to consider a medicine being of high quality if they remained satisfied with its effect in the past. This opinion is typical, above all, of villagers and small-town residents in the central region (68 percent). Residents of the eastern region account for only 43 percent of these consumers.

Own experience is the most-resorted-to criterion for Ukrainians aged 40 to 49 (56.5 percent), which is only natural: the younger Ukrainians are more supposed to follow doctor’s advice and pay attention to the medicine’s producer country and price, while pension-age people will, first of all, look at the price. Besides, the previous experience of using a medicine is of lesser importance for low-income Ukrainians (44 percent) against over 50 percent of high- and higher-than-average-income respondents. The price of a medicament is more important for poorer people than for the most well-to-do Ukrainians: 34 and nine percent, respectively.

For residents of the western region, the most important factor after usage experience is the producer country, while for the other regions it is the price of a package. The quality of packing proved to be the least important selection criterion in all the regions of Ukraine (a mere 3.2 percent of the respondents consider it important). Contrary to all expectations, the survey showed that gender does not matter in medicine quality assessment, and the answers of women differed from those of men by fewer than two percent.

“Naturally, the majority of patients, irrespective of their ethnicity, age, and other differences, assess the quality of a medicine on the basis of the previous experience of its usage,” Diachenko says. “What they see as main criteria is the speed of suppressing the basic symptoms and the absence of side effects. Yet many do not even imagine that, in reality, the absence of symptoms does not mean that the disease has been cured, for it may have gone to a different stage, while side effects may not show themselves but still be able to seriously impair the organism. So it is the doctor who can rightly assess the efficacy of a medicament, also by means of tests. The main difference between Ukrainian and, say, European consumers is that the latter use medicines prescribed by a doctor irrespective of what they think. This occurs because many countries have established strict control and the number of over-the-counter drugs is limited. In Ukraine, however, you can buy without a doctor’s prescription about 50 percent of medicines available in a drugstore. The Ukrainian pharmaceutical market is one of the largest in Central and Eastern Europe and accounts for 9.6 percent of OTC drug sales in this region. So the culture of self-treatment is extremely developed in this country.”

That the Ukrainians sometimes economize on their health may be put down to the fact that most of our compatriots have a low income. Food and housing cost very much, which often leaves inadequate funds for cultural recreation. And medical treatment is not cheap, either, at present, especially if we take into account that prices for all goods and services, including medicines, are always on the rise. This is why many people are choosing cheaper medicines, without looking at their quality, and thus saving on their own health.