Friday, February 3 is National Patient Recognition Day, and the first week of February is a special time for all healthcare providers to stop and reflect on the quality of their patient care, dedication to patient satisfaction and to renew their commitment to the patient’s well-being.

A Patient Perspective
According the National Patient Recognition Week website, patient contact—no matter how trivial—affects a patient’s mental and physical satisfaction, and medical outcomes. All too often, sadly, a mechanical approach to caring infects healthcare providers.

This brief infographic on doctor-patient communication shows that while half of adults take at least one prescription, doctors spend on average just 49 seconds during a visit explaining a new medication.
Time is the greatest deterrent to quality care and patient satisfaction. Healthcare providers have too many things to do, too many interruptions and too much reliance on memory, and these factors are at the root of poor patient satisfaction and outcomes—according to npw.com.

If you are a doctor, pharmacist or healthcare provider, here are four simple ways to help improve adherence and communication:

1. Reinforce the need for treatment and explain what the patient can reasonably expect from medication.
2. Personalize any adherence program to the patient. There are pill boxes specifically for children, teens, for arthritis sufferers, for patients who travel and more.
3. Reinforce or reward the patient for beginning and maintaining his/her medication regimen. There are many new mobile apps for better medication management your patient may like.
4. Target patients at high risk for non-adherence with more intensive strategies.
   Source: Joshua Benner, PharmD, DSc

Tips for Pharmacists
Enabling patients to choose “their” pill box is a great way to foster the emotional commitment necessary to adhere. Prescription vials can mentally affect individuals by reminding them they are sick or the medication makes them feel sick. A pill box or pill reminder provides patients something to connect with that empowers them to take charge and get organized with their medication regimen. Here are some of my favorite new pill box styles.

Tips for Patients Taking new Medication
Take an active role in treatment decisions and don’t be afraid to have an open dialogue with your doctor or pharmacist and ask questions. I’ve listed more than 10 questions to ask your doctor when starting a new medication or treatment regimen.

National Patient Recognition Week encourages healthcare and medical providers to pause and reflect on how well care is delivered. From a patient’s perspective, their well-being and satisfaction must be “priority one” by every single person who interacts with them. Every day is patient satisfaction day.

Are you a healthcare professional? How do you help communication with patients? I welcome your comments!

-Susan

Tags: doctor communication, medication adherence, pill boxes, pill reminder, prescriptions

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 2nd, 2012 at 11:27 am and is filed under Events, Pharmacist Corner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.