Introduction. There are many challenges in the field of medicine treatment, one of this is poor patients' adherence to medicine treatment, which may also be due to lack of knowledge and lack of understanding of medicine therapy. The Medication Use Review service is a pharmacist's cognitive service that focuses on the patient's use of the medicines and understanding the treatment with them. One of the goals of the service is to improve patient's awareness of medicines and consequently contribute to better health outcomes through empowering the patient.
Aim. We aimed to evaluate patient's understanding of medicines for the treatment of chronic diseases and to determine whether the Medication Use Review service has an impact on improving the patient's knowledge of medicines.
Methods. Data about patients' understanding were obtained in a randomized controlled clinical trial, where patients randomized to the test group received MUR at meeting 1, while patients in control group received standard care. After 12 weeks, patients from both group came to re-evaluate the investigated parameters. We evaluated understanding of all patient's medication for chronic use through three questions about the purpose of medicine, dosing regimen and knowledge of special warnings. We evaluated the correctness of the answer as correct, incorrect and doesn't know. The unit of analysis was patient-medicine, which was used to evaluate the level of understanding and change between meetings on the entire sample and comparatively between test and control group. We additionally checked the level of understanding medicine type regarding individual ATC groups.
Results. In the analysis we used the answers of 153 patients from meeting 1 and 140 patients from meeting 2. The sample size per unit of analysis was 1116 patient-medicines. Patients have good knowledge of the purpose of using their medicines (90.2% of correct answers in both meetings) as well as the total daily dose (89.4% and 92.6% of correct answers in meetings 1 and 2). Even higher percentages of correct answers were achieved by patients with newly introduced drugs (94% for the purpose and 88% for the total daily dose). The analysis of the understanding by type of medication revealed, that patients have less knowledge about the purpose of use in the ATC groups for cardiovascular system treatment (C) and genito-urinary system (G). In the dosage regimen, the most problematic medicines are those for the sensory organ (S), respiratory system (R), and alimentary tract and metabolism treatment (A), for the total daily dose the most problematic are the group N (medicines for nervous system treatment) and others, which are mentioned earlier. We obtained the affirmative answer on knowledge of special warnings on meeting 1 at 15% of patient-medicines and 11.2% of patient-medicines at meeting 2.
Conclusion. Understanding the use of medicines is high among patients in our research. Ten percent of patients reported difficulty with understanding the purpose and dosage of the medicines (measured by the total daily dose), however MUR was unsuccesful in improving their status.
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