Assessment of patients' understanding of the use of dispensed medications at a tertiary care hospital of central Gujarat

Background: Medications are an important part of the treatment of patients by clinicians in addition to other measures to be followed by the patients during the entire period of treatment. Objective: To assess patients’ understanding about the use of medications after medicines are dispensed to them by a pharmacist at a tertiary care hospital of Vadodara district in Gujarat. Materials and Methods: It was a descriptive cross-sectional study conducted between the time periods of January 2015 and August 2015. A total of 464 patients were interviewed after they had received medications from the pharmacy window. Descriptive statistics were used for summarizing data. Results: Majority of the interviewed subjects belonged to 25–44 years age group with almost equal representation from both gender and new as well as follow-up visit patients. The patients were prescribed on average of 4.14 medicines (standard deviation 2.10). Only 62 participants (13.4%) had a correct understanding about the use of medication in terms of purpose (20.9%), quantity (86.4%), and frequency in a day (73.1%), and relation of its consumption with food (37.2%). The majority (71.2%) took only one attempt by the investigator for a complete understanding of drug dosages after explanation. Conclusion: The understanding of patients about dispensed medications was low, the lowest being the purpose of medication.