Pharmacovigilance and Its Extent Contribution to Eliminating Marketing Deception: An Exploratory Study on the Opinions of a Sample of Visitors of Some Pharmacies Operating in the Mosul City

Abstract

Two dimensions form the theoretical and field framework for this study, pharmacovigilance and marketing deception. The study revealed that pharmacovigilance represents activities related to detecting, evaluating, understanding, and preventing harmful effects or any other related problem. While, marketing deception (henceforth MD) is marketing practices carried out by organizations or sellers in terms of distorting and misleading facts that cause the customer to be in a precarious state, and result in wrong purchasing decisions. The operating pharmacies within Mosul city were a field for conducting the field study, and the researcher sought to include several questionnaires expressing the study problem that was the basis for building the field studies, including (i) Do the pharmacovigilance contribute to eliminating MD? (ii) Is there an effective correlation between the pharmacovigilance dimension and the after-MD dimension? To answer these questions, a hypothetical scheme of the study was formulated to reflect the relationships and effects between the two dimensions of the study, which resulted in a set of main and secondary hypotheses, that were tested using several statistical means for the data collected by the questionnaire which numbered (527) and all were retrieved. The study listed a set of conclusions that were distributed in terms of theory and field sides, which the researcher presents the most important: (i) According to the answers of contributed individuals, pharmacovigilance does not contribute to eliminating MD. (ii) There is an effective relationship between pharmacovigilance and MD, but to some extent, it is weak due to the absence of adopting pharmacovigilance among the researched individuals, which negatively affected the elimination of MD practiced by some pharmacies operating in Mosul city. (iii) The relative importance of the variables of MD differs from a variable on the pharmacovigilance dimension. Depending on both theoretical and field study findings, proposals were listed consistent with these conclusions, as well as future studies related to the dimensions of the current study were suggested.