- Title
- Are Australian clinicians monitoring medication adherence in hematological cancer survivors? Two cross-sectional studies.
- Creator
- Lynagh, Marita C.; Clinton-McHarg, Tara; Hall, Alix; Sanson-Fisher, Rob; Stevenson, William; Tiley, Campbell; Bisquera, Alessandra
- Relation
- Experimental Hematology & Oncology Vol. 4, Issue 15
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40164-015-0011-4
- Publisher
- BioMed Central
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- Background: Hematological cancer survivors are growing in number and increasingly rely on oral therapy. Given known poor outcomes associated with non-adherence and previous evidence that many patients do not fully adhere to their treatment regimen, this study aimed to determine the degree to which clinicians monitor adherence to oral medication in hematological cancer survivors. Methods: Data was combined from two cross-sectional surveys of a heterogeneous sample of 431 hematological cancer survivors recruited from three outpatient hematology clinics in three different states (n=215) and one state cancer registry (n=216) in Australia. Participants completed a self-administered survey that included demographic characteristics and a 7-item measure of medication adherence developed by the researchers specifically for the purpose of the studies. Results: Of the 431 participants, 37% (n=160) reported currently taking daily cancer-related medication. Of these, 14% (n=23) were found to be non-adherent with 'missing a dose' being the most commonly reported non-adherent behaviour. Only 41% of survivors indicated that their hematologist or cancer clinician had 'always' asked about their cancer-related medication during their last six visits. Conclusion: Non-adherence to oral therapy remains a problem in hematological cancer survivors, yet clinicians in Australia do not appear to be regularly monitoring adherence in their patients. Given an increasing dependence on oral therapy in clinical hematology and medical oncology and the importance of medication adherence to optimising health outcomes, greater effort should be invested in developing effective interventions to improve support and adherence monitoring by cancer clinicians and GPs.
- Subject
- medication adherence; hematological cancer; oral therapy
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1333083
- Identifier
- uon:27008
- Identifier
- ISSN:2162-3619
- Rights
- © Lynagh et al. 2015 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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