Assessing understanding of hypertensive patient towards dispensing instruction and information in Hospital Tuanku Fauziah, Perlis / Mohd Izwan Mansor and Rosshazlida Rozali

Hypertension is defined by persistent elevation of arterial blood pressure. Patients with diastolic blood pressure (DBP) values less than 90 mm Hg and systolic blood pressure (SBP) values greater than or equal to 140 mm Hg have isolated systolic hypertension. Poor understanding of medications will result in poor patient compliance and medication error. PURPOSE: This investigation examined (1) to observe the level of patients’ understanding about the instructions and information of their medicines after collecting medicines from dispensary counter, (2) to verify the causes that make the patients do not understand the instructions and information that have been explained by pharmacy practitioners while collecting their medicines and (3) to come up with solutions that can contribute to improve patients’ compliance. METHODS: The research design was a cross-sectional study were 74 hypertensive patients from medical outpatient clinics in the out-patient pharmacy were interviewed with the aid of questionnaire. Study measures include gender, patient’s age, diagnosis, number of medicine prescribed, educational level, race, level of understanding on medications and labels on the envelope. RESULTS: Gender and total of medicines were significantly not correlated with patients’ understanding on medications and labels according to chi-square test and Man-Whitney U Test. The value of Chi-Square independence test and Man-Whitney Test (p) were not significant between gender and total of medicine towards patients’ understanding and understand the label on the envelope because the p-value is more than 0.05. The value of significant is less than 0.05. Educational level and age were significantly correlated with patients’ understanding and understand the label on the envelope according to both tests because the significant value for both variables was p is less than 0.05. CONCLUSION: Pharmacist plays an important role in improving patient’s understanding on instructions and information among hypertensive patients in order to improve compliance. This is because our findings showed that some patients did not understand the instructions and information.