Patient adherence and clinical outcome in treating diabetes and hypertension in a community pharmacy setting / Nur Zulaikha Abdullah Hani

Poor adherence to medication is a major health problem and common a issue among chronic disease patients such as diabetes and hypertension. There are lots of factors have been recognized to cause non adherence to medication in both diabetic and hypertensive patients. This study tries to investigate what are contributing factors that limit hypertension and diabetic patients adhere to medication regimen. The purpose of this study is to determine factors that influence patients' adherence behaviour. A questionnaire based survey was conducted by randomly selected 100 patients with anti hypertensive and anti diabetic therapy at community pharmacy setting. MORISKY Simplified Self-Report Measure of Adherence Scale has been
used to assess patients' adherence behaviour and parametric test; one way ANOVA and Pearson Correlation, were used to determine any influences and interaction of the variables. We found that there were significant differences existing between daily dosing frequency and number of medication towards patients' adherence level at p=0.05. It shows drug regimen complexity is one of the factors contributing to patients' adherence changes.