PSYCHOLOGY

Psychiatric Patients and medication noncompliance

Introduction

In general, the doctor assumes that once made a proper diagnosis and treatment accordingly, it will be beneficial for the recovery of the patients. However, sometimes a appropriate diagnosis and drug treatment can fail for poor adherence by patients. The most common errors in the failure of a dosage regimen may be of omission, purpose (taking the wrong medication), dosage of chronology or sequence, add self-medication drugs and premature termination of pharmacotherapy. Moreover, in many patients (3-18%) it is because of delaying the start of treatment to 10 days. Surveillance studies of compliance in long-term treatment indicated that 49% of patients made only minor errors in the timing of dosing, 40% made significant errors of dosing, 10% often took excessive doses and only 1% made no mistakes. Of course, these results vary by age of the patients and what is the underlying disease. 20% of patients have periods of 3 or 4 days a month in which it does not take medication. These studies indicate that we must pay attention to the basic principles of the instructions that are given to patients in relation to the maintenance of a medication (Hoffman and Maslan, 2007).

We recognize that it is difficult to identify the patient who does not take the medication correctly except those who are doing therapeutic drug monitoring. The best sick addiction to their medication was achieved a few years ago for a better doctor / patient, but today we can say that one of the goals of pharmaceutical care is to improve medication compliance. The objective of this project is to study the medication noncompliance behavior in Psychiatric Patients and I will focus on identified health risk and I will develop a teaching tool that would promote healthy behaviors to decrease the health risk or that would promote a higher quality of life for these patients. I develop a learning tool that will help in educating the patients.

Rational

The conditions under which a psychiatric patient receives the medication may be important, studies show that in psychiatric patients lack of compliance is 19%, patients receive day care only has 37% of noncompliance and clinics show 48%. This indicates the importance of teaching the principles of self-medication before the patient leaves the hospital.

What are the consequences of lack of adherence to prescribing? It seems clear that even though they are often the physician and the patient did not fully appreciate. The under utilization of prescribed drug deprives the patient of the therapeutic actions sought. This can lead to the recurrence or worsening of the same, the emergence of antibiotic resistant organisms or may cause an increase in the dose leading to a toxic effect. Excessive use of the drug leads to a greater likelihood of adverse effects. Such problems can go unnoticed. Unfortunately a common trend is that the patient forgets the ingestion of a dose, double the next, or takes the view that if one tablet is good two must be better (Fankhauser and Lancaster, ...