Patients' knowledge about their medications during emergency visits

Abstract EN

Objective: To assess Emergency Department patients' knowledge about their medications.

Methods: The study was conducted at King Hussein Medical Center-Emergency Department between November 2005 and January 2006.

A specially designed interview schedule was used by the researchers to collect data from a total of 438 adult patients who satisfied the inclusion criteria for the study.

Results: Demographic characteristics of the sample included mean age of 50.8 years (range 16-81 years).

Out of 438 patients, 282 (64%) were male.

The majority of the patients (48%) had attained intermediate education (elementary-secondary) whereas 37% were illiterate, and only 15% held a university degree.

The three most common recorded chronic diseases were cardiovascular (34%), cardiovascular with diabetes (11%), and respiratory diseases (11%).

The mean number of medications per patient was 3.9 (range 1-8).

The study found that only 78 (18%) patients knew all their medication names, 20 (5%) patients knew all their medication doses and 224 (51%) patients knew the medication time to be taken.

Only 156 (36%) patients were able to recognize their medications by names whereas 219 (50%) relied on other means like shape, colour, pill size, etc.

About 223 (51%) patients did not know the purpose of each medication they were using and only 29% of the patients brought a list of their medications to the Emergency Department.

The most common source of information was physicians (45%), followed by pharmacists (34%) and nurses (9%).

The study also found that the more educated the patients were the more likely they were able to recall their medications’ names, times, doses, and purposes.

Notably patients with cardiovascular diseases were more strict in to bringing their medication list (56%) than those with other chronic diseases.

Conclusion: There was poor knowledge of medications among the study group, and only less than onethird of them brought a list of their medications to the Emergency Department.

Medication knowledge decreased, as the number of medications increased.