Beliefs About Medicines and its Relationship With Medication Adherence in Patients With Chronic Diseases

Patients’ beliefs about medicines can affect their adherence to the medicines. The aim of this study was to determine beliefs about medicines and medication adherence and its associated factors in patients with chronic diseases.

In this cross-sectional descriptive study, 268 patients with chronic diseases in 2019-2020 were included by convenience sampling method. The beliefs about medicines questionnaire and the Medication Adherence Scale were used for data collection. Data were analyzed in SPSS version 20 using One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), independent t-test and Pearson correlation coefficient at the significance level of α = 0.05.

The Mean±SD score of beliefs about medicines in terms of harms of medicines was 2.53±0.71, in benefits of medicines was 4.27±0.49 and overdose of the medicines was 3.23±0.79.There was a relationship between all three dimensions of beliefs about medicines with medication adherence (P<0.05). There was a direct relationship between the use of herbal medicine and belief in the harms of medicines (P<0.05). In addition, there was a relationship between gender and education level with belief in the benefits of the medicines (P<0.05).

Some chronic patients’ beliefs about the drug were not appropriate and they believed that the drugs were harmful and that the drugs were over-prescribed by doctors. Belief in the harms of the medicines, the benefits of the medicines, and the overdose of the medicines are associated with medication adherence in patients with chronic diseases. Patients should be encouraged to express their views on medications in order to improve patients’ beliefs about medication.