Knowledge of and attitudes to pharmacotherapy in medical inpatients

Objective: To analyze different aspects of patients' knowledge and attitude s to pharmacotherapy in medical inpatients. Patients: 183 patients hospital ized in the Department of Medicine of University Hospital "Merkur", Zagreb, Croatia were investigated. Methods: A questionnaire was designed to invest igate patients' knowledge of drugs they were taking before admission to the hospital and drugs they are receiving during hospitalization. Patients wer e asked to give drug names, dosage and reasons for their prescription. Pati ents' rating of the importance of some drug characteristics (dosage, indica tion, precautions, side-effects, mode of action) was evaluated. Results: A representative group of patients (mean age 55.5 years, range 17 - 86, SD 16 .1; 89 men, 94 women; 50 hematological, 44 cardiological, 50 gastroenterolo gical and 39 nephrological patients) showed a significantly better (p < 0.0 00001) overall knowledge of drugs taken prior to admission compared to the knowledge of drugs that they were receiving during hospitalization. Overall drug knowledge did not differ significantly between groups of patients str atified according to gender, ward, number of drugs they were taking or dura tion of treatment. In older patients (p < 0.0001) and in those with lower e ducation (p < 0.001) a significantly worse overall knowledge was observed. On a 1 - 5 semiquantitative scale patients rated dosage as the most importa nt and mode of action as the least important drug characteristic (average 3 .62 and 2.08, respectively). Of all patients, 94.5% pointed out physicians as one of their sources of drug information, written drug information follo wed in 40.4% and pharmacists in only 11.5% of patients. Conclusions: Our re sults agree with the results of the few similar studies published to date. A need for better health education of patients is underlined and possible w ays of providing drug information for patients are discussed. The need for improvement of physician-patient transfer of drug information as well as th e need for written drug information tailored according to patients' needs i s underlined.