Monitoring and managing medication adherence in community pharmacies in Quebec, Canada

Abstract

Background: Community pharmacists have direct access to prescription refill information and regularly interact with their patients. Therefore, they are in a unique position to promote optimal medication use. Objectives: To describe how community pharmacists in Quebec, Canada, identify nonadherent patients, monitor medication use and promote optimal medication adherence. Methods: An invitation to complete a web-based survey was published online through different platforms, including a Facebook pharmacists’ group, an electronic newsletter, a pharmacy network forum and e-mail. The survey included questions on participant characteristics, methods used by pharmacists to identify nonadherent patients and monitor medication use and interventions they used to promote medication adherence. Results: In total, 342 community pharmacists completed the survey. The participants were mainly women (71.6%), staff pharmacists (56.7%) and aged 30 to 39 years (34.2%). The most common method to identify nonadherent patients was to check gaps between prescription refills (98.8%). The most common intervention to promote adherence was patient counselling (82.5%). The most common barriers to identifying nonadherent patients were lack of time (73.1%) and lack of prescription information (65.8%), whereas the most common barriers to intervening were anticipation of a negative reaction from their patients (91.2%) and lack of time (64%). Conclusion: Lack of time and lack of prescription information are frequent challenges encountered by community pharmacists regarding effective monitoring and management of patients with poor medication adherence. Pharmacists could benefit from electronic tools based on prescription refills that would provide quick and easily interpretable information on their patients’ medication adherence. Can Pharm J (Ott) 2020;153:xx-xx.

Medication nonadherence: Time for a proactive approach by pharmacists

“… 11 Pharmacists often cite time limitations as a reason for not pursuing interventions. 12 If time is an issue, there are a number of validated self-report measures that patients can complete to identify the barriers to adherence ( Table 3 ). By being proactive, pharmacists can gauge and address potential problems with adherence for new prescriptions or ongoing therapy.…”