Pursuant to the revision of the Pharmacists' Law in April, 1997, we pharmacists have the responsibility to provide information to patients about medications. However, it is uncertain as to wheter written information is effective enough for the elderly living in our community.
Our research focused on the results of providing written drug information to 161 elderly homecare recipients aged 65 and older. Medication use was observed by pharmacistconducted interviews during home visits. Compliance was estimated by comparing the prescribed regimens with medications actually being taken at home. Knowledge about medications was also analyzed. Our results showed that the elderly home-care recipients knew only 2.4% of the names, 34.2% of the purposes, 66.0% of the dosages, 2.0% of the side effects, and 0.06% of the interactions of their prescribed medications.
We found that written drug information significantly increased the patients' knowledge of the name of the diseases, the purposes of the drugs, and the side effects. However, such knowledge did not improve the compliance among the elderly. Medication knowledge was also not affected by written drug information when the elderly patient had a hearing or visual impaiment. Nevertheless, we found that there was significant inverse association between knowledge of the name of the drug and compliance among those elderly patients who had a visual impairment without any written drug information.
It is therefore crucial that pharmacists provide elderly home-care recipients with not only verbal but also written information about their medications.

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