Government inspection and peer supervision visits
Government recommends monthly inspection visits by district drug
inspectors. However, results in table 3 revealed that inspection was not
done as per statutory recommendations. The slight but insignificant
increase in number of inspection visits by the district drug inspector
in the intervention district were in tandem with what has been referred
to by many scholars as social proof34,35.
In the social proof theory, people tend to do things because other
people are doing them. This is in line with what the researchers of this
study wanted to achieve-strengthening the district health system. Given
that there was no statistical difference in inspection visits between
DDIs from the two districts overall, we were able to attribute
observable intervention effects to peer supervision.