Study of factors that affect patients’ compliance towards appointment date for topping up medication in Farmasi Makmur, Hospital Tengku Ampuan Afzan (HTAA) Kuantan

Objectives: To evaluate patient’s compliance to top-up date, determine the factors that affect patient’s non-compliance, to find out alternative ways to overcome this problem, determine the association between sociodemographic factor, physical factors and compliance, educate the patient about the importance of compliance to prevent the disease exacerbation and to evaluate the patient non- compliant problem in HTAA. Methods: Searches for relevant reports were conducted using the MEDLINE and BLACKWELL databases. To analyze the data, medication possession ratio (MPR) and Morisky score were used to determine patient compliance. Relation between variable and compliance were compared using contingency table and Chi-square tests. Results: A total of 149 respondent were identified from the literature search while the other 35 respondents were excluded from this research for some reason. The average proportion of patients with an MPR>80% was 67.5% overall. There are no significance between compliance and address, age, sex, race, diagnosis, total of medication, education level, income, marital status, employment status, person who is taking medicine, vehicle to take medicine and Morisky score. There is an association between compliance and duration of medication based on Chi-square tests, p<0.05. Thus, patients that have duration of medication less than 3 months is more comply than patients that have duration of medication for 4 months and above. Conclusions: Patients compliance in Hospital Tengku Ampuan Afean (HTAA) is not a serious problem because through this research, we found that more than 50% of patients taking medication for more than 80% of their days on therapy. Good compliance has positive effect on clinical outcome, suggesting that management of outpatient pharmacy may be improved by improving patient compliance.