[Pharmacy counselling and antiretroviral therapy compliance: a patient survey]

All patients must be in position to take advantage of advances in pharmaceutical therapy as well as information on their treatment when medicine-taking scheme are complex and/or undesirable effects are expected. That is why in 1996 we set up a pharmacy consultation carried out by staff specially trained for it. The two objectives of this study are, on the one hand, to assess the patient's compliance and also their knowledge on the medical prescription with the help of a questionnaire and on the other hand, to check the implementation by the staff of our procedures (handing over medicine-taking scheme whenever there has been a change in the patient's treatment). The answers to the questionnaire have shown 73% of the patients totally complied with the treatment, the most commonly-used means not to forget the taking of the treatment is the pill box, the necessity of taking the medicines regularly is most frequently considered as something preventing the patient's good compliance (37.5%), and 81% of the patients think they are in good or excellent spirits. However, 63% of the patients declare they have not been given a medicine-taking scheme. The result must be weighted for the patients may not remember things with accuracy. As a conclusion, our survey has shown treatment compliance is close to that described in the literature on the subject and it encourages us to change the course of the consultation.