Clinical pharmacist's interventions on medication adherence and knowledge of inflammatory bowel disease patients

Abstract

Objective: To evaluate whether clinical pharmacist's interventions have any impact on medication adherence of patients having inflammatory bowel disease and to assess the awareness of patients about their disease and the significance of medications they use. Materials and Methods: A prospective, interventional follow up study was conducted in the outpatients visiting Gastroenterology and Hepatology department of Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Kochi. To assess the level of medication adherence and patient's awareness, MMAS-8 and CCKNOW has been utilized. Once this baseline information's were collected, counselling was given to patients and they were supplemented with pill cards and patient information leaflets as educational material. During the follow up visit, all the above parameters were reassessed and compared with the baseline visit. Result: About 110 IBD patients have participated in this study. In baseline visit, 6.36% patients had low adherence, 62.73% patients had medium adherence, 30.91% patients had high adherence. During follow up visit, after intervention by clinical pharamcist, 3.64% patients had low adherence, 18.18% patients had medium adherence and 78.18 % patients had high adherence. From this study, it was notified that the average score of CCKNOW was only 8.15 in the beginning. Later on, it was escalated to 11.65 during the revisit periods. Conclusion: Knowledge of patients about their disease and medications were insufficient during baseline visit. Adherence to medication was found to be poor among IBD patients. Counselling provided by clinical pharmacist about the importance of medication adherence and provision of information leaflets and pill cards lead to an improvement in medication adherence and knowledge of IBD patients.