Pauline Norris
A University of Otago researcher has advised health
professionals to ask patients who lives with them, after
research found members of a household can influence a patient's
prescription medicine-taking decisions.
"They ought to say: `who else lives in your household? Are
they helping and do you want them to help?'," Prof Pauline
Norris, who holds a chair in social pharmacy in the
university's School of Pharmacy, said at a seminar in Dunedin
this week.
Prof Norris is one of a team of researchers analysing many
aspects of the use and misuse of medications in everyday
life.
The medications being studied include vitamins, dietary
supplements, alternative medicines, over-the-counter remedies
and prescriptions.
The "enormous project" involved interviewing members of 57
households about what medications were kept in the house,
where and how they were stored, how they were used, how they
felt about medicines, and what influenced them to take
medicines, she said.
Household members were also asked to keep diaries for a week
listing what medicines they noticed in advertisements and
retail outlets, and what medications they took.
Prof Norris then looked more closely at how relationships
between the members of 15 households where at least one
person was caring for the health needs of another, influenced
prescription medicine-taking decisions.
While she found family members, carers or flatmates could
assist medicine takers in several ways, they could also
influence patients not to take medications.
Sometimes, parents or carers looking after children or
elderly people chose not to administer a prescription
medicine, or to administer less than the recommended dose.
It would be useful for health professionals to consider such
influences, she said.
Households members were also asked to collect and show all
medicines stored at home.
Prof Norris said she was stuck by the large number of
prescription medicines people kept and the number of people
who had prescription medicines dating back 20 years or more.
allison.rudd@odt.co.nz
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