Patient Counseling: A Complete Guide for Compliance

Abstract

While drugs have the capacity to enhance health, they all have the potential to harm if prescribed inappropriately. For this reason, it is recommended that healthcare professionals who prescribe medications should exercise counseling, as general people have least idea and interest about healthcare settings, use of medicine and their untoward effects. Pharmacists have crucial role plays in both handling prescription and prescribing. A rational prescribing is the sole of patient safety, compliance and patient relief. Patients have an altered mental state mostly driven by emotional disturbance for being ill. Along with that cultural and economic factor gives rise to a question of out of the pocket expense. The sole of this article is to impart necessity of a professional’s assistance that help patient to understand his illness, benefit of treatment and a clear instruction to follow. Other than patients in this materialistic world, all are busy. Mostly prescribers avoid patient counseling and patients have their medication without maintaining proper guidelines. This article should impart an expression of reminder to all providers to be more patient to give more to their patients. Conversely general people should be careful about demanding full assistance of clear instruction for any drug or non-drug treatment procedure. The soul of this article was to detail about patient compliance and therapeutic drug outcomes after a comprehensive patient counseling. Along with students, researchers and professionals of different background and disciplines, e.g. Pharmacists, doctors, nurses, hospital authorities, public representatives, policy makers and regulatory authorities have to acquire much from this article.

Patient counselling service with the use of pictograms as the example of pharmacist intervention to improving compliance and medicine safety

“…Pharmacists, who provide pharmaceutical counseling, play a vital role in this respect [17][18][19]. The literature indicates many advantages of patient counseling; among others, patients become aware of the importance of therapy, understand doctors' recommendations, become active participants in the treatment process, and thus better follow the treatment recommendations [20].…”