A least half the patients using government prescription clinics do not know what medication they are on, according to a recently published study.
Women tend to be better informed than men, with 56 per cent of those interviewed understanding what their treatment consisted of, compared to 45 per cent of men.
But less than a quarter of all patients had their prescription card up to date.
Called ‘Evaluating a Prescription Clinic at a Primary Health Centre’, the study was published in the Malta Medical Journal by Justine Farrugia Preca and Jurgen Abela, two GPs working in primary health care.
They wanted to get a snapshot of who uses the clinics, the diseases for which prescriptions are issued and the patients’ knowledge of treatment.
The data was collected through questionnaires from 99 patients in three randomly selected clinics.
Prescription clinics allow patients to refill prescriptions every two to six months through an appointment system. GPs are expected to see one patient every four minutes.
The researchers said there was an urgent need to improve upon the clinics’ safety and maximise their efficiency, and use them to empower and educate patients.
This would improve drug compliance, treatment safety, condition control and overall efficiency.
It is very frustrating and dangerous to be faced by a patient with a badly controlled chronic condition who does not know what treatment he is on
The study highlighted the risk of not asking patients about their use of over-the-counter medicine, saying there was lack of awareness of the risk of self-administering drugs such as non steroidal anti-inflammatories, especially among the elderly.
This “further supports the importance of a drug review clinic more than a prescription clinic”, the researchers said.
It would be the first step towards facilitating regular treatment review with safe modification by GPs.
“It is very frustrating and dangerous to be faced by a patient with a badly controlled chronic condition and not being able to improve control at the first consultation because the patient does not know what treatment he is on and has no updated list,” the study said.
This reduced the efficiency of GP consultations because a second consultation was then needed, also affecting quick intervention and possibly leading to a “complete lack of disease control since patients are not always willing to visit clinics again at such short intervals”.
The clinics’ main function of prevention “is being jeopardised through the lack of proper communication between health centre physicians, hospital based physicians and dispensing pharmacists”, the study adds.
It makes a number of recommendations, such as a real-time record keeping system to facilitate a multidisciplinary approach to treatment review, increasing the chance that dosage, medication errors and treatment interactions are identified and corrected.