Objective: To assess physicians’ and patients’ attitudes about the therapy in terms of rational use of medicines (RUM) contributes to the elimination of problems. This study evaluated the health care service in terms of RUM delivered to patients in primary and secondary health care centres.

Method: A questionnaire was applied to a total of 4470 patients from primary health care centres (PHCs) and public hospitals (PHs) in 12 provinces of Turkey. Briefly, patients’ knowledge, attitude and experiences about RUM were questioned and answers were compared with socio-demographic characteristics.

Results: Of the patients, 72.8% in PHCs, 89.9% in PHs reported that they had physical examination. The number of patients who had physical examination decreased with increasing age and low educational level (p<0.001). Although the examination time was “≤5 minutes” for 40.5% of the patients, 74.1% of them in PHCs, 50.1% in PHs reported that they were “definitely” satisfied with the allocated examination time. Eleven per cent of the patients stated that they did not know “how to use their drugs on prescription” and 45.4% reported that “the information given by physicians about their drugs was partly enough or not enough”. Patients stated that waiting time for examination was 13.5±14.2 minutes in PHCs and 45.3±50.5 minutes in PHs.

Conclusion: In contrast to patients’ general satisfaction in health care services, some problems were detected about the examination time and waiting time for examination, informing patients about their drugs. Even though, these problems seem to be derived from physicians, the effects of infrastructural inadequacies and other reasons should be examined with further studies.