Healthcare professionals' knowledge, attitudes and future expectations towards personalized medicine

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.