Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
A study was conducted among outpatients of a teaching hospital to determine (1) the extent of drug defaulting, (2) the clinical significance of specific errors and (3) the interrelationship among several variables. The study included 134 patients who received 380 prescriptions. The study instrument was an in-depth personal interview of the patient at home seven to ten days after his clinic visit. Only 22% of the prescriptions studied were being consumed properly and 31% were being misutilized in a manner that posed a serious threat to the patients' health. The most frequent errors concerned improper dosing intervals and premature discontinuance of medication. A positive relationship was found between prescription label information provided and patient comprehension of directions, and between comprehension and compliance. It was concluded that a major contributing factor ,to the drug defaulting problem was lack of complete and comprehensible directions from either the pharmacist or the physician. It is suggested that pharmacists can play a dual role in minimizing the drug defaulting problem by providing complete label information to the patient and by influencing physicians to include on prescriptions more complete directions for proper self-administration of medications.
Boyd et al. (Wed,) studied this question.