Medication Adherence: Brown And Bussell

Medication adherence refers to whether a patient is taking their prescribed medication as directed. Many chronic illnesses can be fought of and beaten with the use of pharmacotherapy. However, many patients cease to take their prescription, which could happen for a number of reasons, ranging from the patient, to the physician (Brown, Bussell, 2011). This is a very big problem, as developing, manufacturing, and distributing drugs costs a lot of money, and even human lives, that will go to waste and be destroyed if people do not take their medications. In the United States alone, hospitalization occurring for prescription reasons account for one to two thirds of admittance (Brown, Bussell, 2011). This means people are coming in for problems

This equation is: (Number of Pills Absent)/(Number of Pills Prescribed). If the ratio falls below 80%, then a patient is considered “not adherent”. A patient could have problems that can cause him/her to be non-adherent. Some of the common ones could range from being too lazy and forgetful to take them, to not liking the side effects a drug can cause. In Brown and Bussell’s paper they state “Several patient-related factors, including lack of understanding of their disease, lack of involvement in the treatment decision–making process, and suboptimal medical literacy, contribute to medication nonadherence.” As health care professionals, it can be easy to forget that not everyone has the same level of medical knowledge as specialists. So when talking to the patient about their medication, they may not understand the medical terms, and may not take their pills as prescribed. Along similar lines, the patients may not have any methods to receive support from family and friends, making it harder to adhere to the requirements. Patients may also just lack the money for all the pills required to treat their ailment, thus falling short of becoming healthy again, and putting them at higher risk for hospitalization and

Both the patient and the pharmacist can change and fix their ways in order to decrease mortality. Pharmacists could prescribe the maximum amount of pills allowed in order to limit the amount of times a patient has to go to the pharmacy, to ease the burden on the patient and even the specialist (Zullig, Mendys, Bosworth, 2016.) There is also research showing that when a organization or health care system was helping pharmacist with knowledge on medication adherence, the usual care that was provided generally improved significantly (Timmers, Boons, 2017.) All of these techniques have improved on medication adherence, and have helped save people from their chronic illness and