Stay healthy, take your pills!
In the United States, about 30% of seniors forget to fill out their prescription. Taking the wrong dosage, the wrong pill, or simply forget about taking it, is currently affecting over 55% of these older adults, who represent over 40 million people. The price to pay for these mistakes is first and foremost a human one.
This is the second post of a series (you can check the first post here) concerning the consequences of not taking the pills as prescribed by the doctor, among the senior population. So let’s take a look at the consequences we have to face when an apparently simple pill is forgotten.
First, we pay the price of inefficiency: medication errors and non-adherence make the prescribed treatment much less efficient, and cause the physicians and care professionals to misinterpret possible health complications linked to this, thus taking poorer decisions on the patient’s treatment. As reported by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), non-adherence is causing 30% to 50% of treatment failure among chronic patients.
Second, we pay a heavy human cost: there are over 125,000 deaths in the US, every year, due to patient’s non-adherence to prescribed treatments. Missing a simple and every-day task as taking a pill can actually increase the risk of mortality by up to 25%.
According to the CDC, these numbers are even higher regarding conditions that are common among the older adults. For instance, mortality chances can increase up to 80% when it comes to cardiovascular diseases. Also, among patients with hypertension, it is estimated that 86,000 premature deaths could be avoided every year with an appropriate use of the prescribed medication treatment.
Last, but not least, we pay the price of losing independence. Non-adherence increases the risk of hospitalization by 20% to 40% among older adults. It has a negative impact in their quality of life, their ability to heal and their mobility, often forcing them to make radical changes. Non-adherence is associated with as much as 40% of nursing home admissions, thus diminishing senior’s capacity to take their life and health in hands.
It is clear that finding efficient solutions for non-adherence is an urgent matter. There are actually many factors that contribute to non-adherence among older adults such as the complexity of the drug regimen, drugs risks, interactions and reactions, poor instructions, packaging and formulation, or simply lack of health literacy and consciousness of this issue: a study by ExpressScripts found that, when asked, patients with actual adherence levels inferior to 25% reported it was more than 90%. The CDC estimates that adults aged 65 or older have the lowest proficient health literacy skills, and 60% of patients can’t even identify their own pills.
These factors need to be targeted and addressed through the investment in adherence strategies and programs for the elderly in order to reverse the negative impacts that have been observed. If it’s about improving and saving senior’s lives, providing well-being and efficient treatment, there is also a sticking financial impact to this issue, as non-adherence is one of the most costly challenges in the US healthcare system. Find out about it in our next article.
Photo credits: livingthegoodlifenaturally.com
