Impact of Pharmacist Counselling on Medication Adherence among Elderly Patients on Antihypertensive Therapy in a Tertiary Care Hospital of Nepal
Keywords:
Pharmacist, Blood Pressure, Counseling, Elderly, Hypertension, Medication AdherenceAbstract
Background: Poor adherence (compliance) is common with antihypertensive medications among elderly patients. As the elderly people are prone to multiple comorbidities, they are at higher risk of polypharmacy and therefore may present with a higher risk of non-adherence to medications compared to the younger population. The study was conducted to investigate the impact of pharmacist counseling on medication adherence among elderly hypertensive patients.
Methods: The elderly hypertensive patients who visited the out-patient department at Chitwan Medical College (CMC) between August to November 2018. The face-to-face interview was conducted among 332 elderly hypertensive patients, selected with the purposive sampling technique. A paired t-test was used to show the difference between pre-test and post-test medication adherence.
Results: It was found that 13.85% of patients were poor adherent and 86.14% low adherent in the intervention and the control group. The major reason for non-adherence was found to be carelessness about taking medicine (97%). The adherence score for intervention group changed from 1.60±0.83 to 3.95±0.56 (p-value < 0.001) while in the control group the average score before and after follow up was 1.48±0.77 and 1.51±0.80 (p=0.373) respectively. Blood pressure status improved in the intervention group than the control group (p<0.001). Polypharmacy was 27.71%, 15.66% of whom experienced adverse drug reactions.
Conclusion: The patient medication counseling had a good impact on hypertensive patients. All factors of the Morisky Green Levine adherence scale improved after counseling and motivation. Pharmacist-led counseling improved medication adherence among elderly hypertensive patients.
Downloads
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
All articles published in EJMS are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). The author(s) as the copyright holder will retain the ownership of the copyrights without any restrictions for their content under the CC-BY 4.0 license, and allow others to copy, use, print, share, modify, and distribute the content of the article even in commercial purpose as long as the original authors and the journal are properly cited. No permission is required from the author/s or the publishers. Appropriate attribution can be provided by simply citing the original article.
On behalf of all the authors, the corresponding author is responsible for completing and returning the agreement form to the editorial office. More information about the terms and conditions, privacy policies, and copyrights can be found on the webpage of the Creative Commons license privacy policy. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
