Knowledge of and attitudes to pharmacotherapy in medical inpatients

To analyze different aspects of patients' knowledge and attitudes to pharmacotherapy in medical inpatients.

183 patients hospitalized in the Department of Medicine of University Hospital "Merkur", Zagreb, Croatia were investigated.

A questionnaire was designed to investigate patients' knowledge of drugs they were taking before admission to the hospital and drugs they are receiving during hospitalization. Patients were asked to give drug names, dosage and reasons for their prescription. Patients' rating of the importance of some drug characteristics (dosage, indication, precautions, side-effects, mode of action) was evaluated.

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 gastroenterological and 39 nephrological patients) showed a significantly better (p < 0.000001) 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 stratified according to gender, ward, number of drugs they were taking or duration of treatment. In older patients (p < 0.0001) and in those with lower education (p < 0.001) a significantly worse overall knowledge was observed. On a 1-5 semiquantitative scale patients rated dosage as the most important 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 followed in 40.4% and pharmacists in only 11.5% of patients.

Our results agree with the results of the few similar studies published to date. A need for better health education of patients is underlined and possible ways of providing drug information for patients are discussed. The need for improvement of physician-patient transfer of drug information as well as the need for written drug information tailored according to patients' needs is underlined.