The Adherence to Medical Advice
The Health Organisation 1996 says that: ‘Health is a state of complete
physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of
disease or infirmity‘.
Adherence to medical advice includes why people don’t adhere to
medical advice, measuring adherence and improving adherence.
Barat et al.(2001) conducted semi-structured interviews in which they
aimed to find the variables that affect adherence to health requests
made by General Practitioners (GP). The information gathered was
collected from 350 70 year olds who were visited by experimenters, who
looked in their medicine cupboard and asked them questions about the
frequency of taking the medicine and about the medicine itself. The
GP’s of the patients were also asked about their patient’s
prescription, which was compared to the answers given by the
participants. It was found that there was disagreement by 22% over the
medicine, 71% over the doses, 69% over the treatment programme used.
24% of the participants did not always follow up their prescription,
but this was common amongst those who had a low dose or was less
frequently taken. Only 60% knew the purpose of their medicine, 21%
knew the problems that would arise if they stopped taking their
medicine and only 6% knew the possible side effects of the drugs. It
was concluded that the patients were more likely to adhere to the
treatment programme they knew more about taking the drugs, and less
likely to adhere if they were taking three or more prescribed drugs.
Chung and Naya (2000) aimed to measure adherence rates of asthmatics
to taking oral medication, and therefore be able to me...
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...a treatment if they know more about the treatment.
To make the child’s adherence to the medical subscription better then
a reward scheme (positive reinforcement) could be introduced, for
example for every week/month the child has a perfect dosage score then
they will receive a bag of sweets.
The doses could be measured using an electronically device similar to
the ‘TrackCap’ used by Chung and Naya (2000) in heir experiment. Each
time the child goes to the doctor the child gives him his inhaler and
the doctor checks to see if the number of uses and refills fit’s the
time period, if so the child would get a reward. With the incentive of
the sweets the child would become more eager to get a perfect score
and get his sweets, the positive reinforcement therefore causing the
child to adhere to the prescription far better.