2016 Volume 42 Issue 11 Pages 767-772
The maintenance and improvement of medication compliance is important, and the medication counseling offered to dementia patients by pharmacists also plays an important role in providing effective dementia treatment. However, there have been no reports on pharmacists educating dementia patients continuously via an outpatient department to date. To achieve maintenance of taking medicine instruction and medicine compliance at Oita University hospital after August 2015 and in the outpatient memory care department of our hospital, where dementia patients undergo their medical examinations, a pharmacist delivered the new drug management instructions (hereafter, pharmacist outpatient department). Eighteen patients received instructions from a pharmacist from August 2015 through May 2016. We investigated the reasons why doctors requested these specific instructions, the intervention contents used by the pharmacist, and the outcome using a Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) before and after the instructions began and patients began the new medicine regimen. The results of the study found that the instructions by pharmacists increased their medicine use continuation rate, but MMSE had not changed. It is considered that the instructions given by pharmacists in dementia outpatient departments are connected to the maintenance of anti-dementia medicine regimens by improving patients' medicine-taking compliance.
