Medication Non-Adherence

Words: 1132
Pages: 5

Medication non-adherence in patients could due to various reasons that may associated with intentional or unintentional behaviour. Therefore, as a health care provider should be always be alert and aware with the patients’ behaviour and reactions when discussing the medication and treatment. For instance, forgetful patient; religious issues; patient having difficulty in reading and writing, which is also known as low literacy; patient having communication problems with the health care provider or patient does not understand well; patient who has history in psychiatric or mental problems such as depression, anxiety or addiction; patient who shows concern regarding the cost or the side effects of medication; patient who does not confident and …show more content…
For example, electronic prescription service. Through this method, the behaviour of patients in taking their recommended medication or regimens could be estimated from refill adherence measures. Therefore, from the prescription refill records over a period, it is said to be a method that allows to detect multidrug adherence among patients and also able to identify the effectiveness of the medication.

On the other hand, there are also devices designated to monitor the medication adherence among the patients which are also known as Electronic Medication Packaging (EMP) devices and among the most generally used EMP device is the Medication Events Monitoring Systems (MEMS). This system has a microprocessor that function to record the dates and times whenever the patients open the bottle caps to take the medication. Hence, it can be used to measures the medication non-adherence whether patient follows the recommended
…show more content…
However, it is also said to have a poor accuracy and might causes bias where the response results could be affected by physiological state or the respondent. Thus, this method generally can only predict medication adherence weakly.
Following are the example of measurements via this method:

Patient interviews by the health care provider is a low cost and easy method in identifying and evaluating patient’s medication adherence, where the health care provider will be able to understand more regarding the patient medication-taking behaviour, patient’s knowledge regarding the given treatment.

Patient-kept diary is a self-report documentation tool that records the patient’s adherence in the prescribed medication.

Another self-report method includes questionnaires and scales, which is required to be filled by patients or their guardian to further evaluate the medication adherence in patients. This review method could be useful in detecting medication-taking behaviours in patient, adherence issues and barriers as well as patients beliefs and concern that impact on adherence. However, this approach would be a drawback and barrier for the patients whom has a low level of