Title: COMPLIANCE TO MEDICATIONS IN RHEUMATOLOGY CLINIC: THE PATIENT RECALL AS AN INDICATOR
Author(s): M. Saleh1, A. Al Ghafri2, F. Al Balushi2
Institute(s): 1Wales Deanery, Rheumatology and GIM, Cardiff, United Kingdom, 2Royal Hospital, Rheumatology, Muscat, Oman
Background: Compliance to medications has been an important issue in health research for
many decades especially in rheumatic diseases, given both the health impact and economic
consequences.
Here we observe d the compliance-to-treatment of patients attending rheumatology clinics in Royal Hospital in Muscat, between January 2015 and June 2015.
The patients recall of their medications was assessed against different factors including their underlying rheumatologic disease, its duration, other associated diseases, age, the number of medications prescribed, frequency of clinic visits, and other factors.
Methods: After obtaining the required ethical approval, we recruited 275 patients who
completed a locally designed questionnaire collecting information about the patients' recall of medications as a measure to assess compliance and was categorized into either fully, partially or not recalling medications.
We used Chi square test to analyse the associations between the patients' ability to recall the number of medications they were taking with the studied factors.
Results: Out of the number of patients who had a complete set of data (n=235), 86%
reported they are taking their medications regularly, 9% not taking it regularly, and 5% didn't provide an answer.
However, 37% were fully recalling, 21% partially recalling and 42% not recalling their
prescribed medications (p < 0.01).
Poor recall was associated with age below 20 and over 60 years (p < 0.04), and diagnosis with Rheumatoid Arthritis OR 0.74 (95% CI 0.4 to 1.3).
And good recall with age between 40-49 years, longer duration of disease, and Systemic Lupus Erythematosus OR 1.7 (95% CI 0.9 to 3.0).
Those given information about their disease (86%) showed no significant difference from others (14%) (p 0.96).
Limitations include small sample size and missing data.
Conclusion: Recall of medications helped to identify associations with compliance to
medications and paving the way to further studies into patients education about
medications.

Compliance To Medications In Rheumatology Clinic: The Patient Recall As An Indicator