Poor Drug Compliance and Education to Asthma Patients Essay

Poor Drug Compliance and Education to Asthma Patients - Essay Example Unintentional non-compliance results when the patient lacks understanding on doctor’s prescription due to factors such as illiteracy, language barrier, or forgetfulness. Intentional non-compliance results due to patient’s choice to ignore the medication for personal reasons or fear of side effects of the drugs. Heath care teams such as nurses and doctors can play a major role in enhancing medical adherence. This can be through reviewing the compliance of patients to the medications, identifying, and dealing with the reasons behind patient’s noncompliance. Background Asthma is a chronic respiratory disease, which is triggered by allergens such as tobacco smoke, rapid weather changes, and infections. Asthma is characterized by attacks of inflammation and narrowing of small airways when asthmatic persons are exposed to the trigger factors. Asthma attacks can be mild or life threatening. Asthma symptoms include shortness of breath, wheezing or panting, chest pain, as well as coughing (Axelsson & Lotvall, 2012). Good compliance with medical regimes is a main factor to prevent these symptoms. There is no cure for asthma, but there are medicine used for Asthma management that enables patients live a normal life. There are several medications options and guidelines to treat asthma and help to diagnose and manage the chronic disease that has been established (McDonald, 2002).  Management entails reducing exposure to allergens or asthma triggers and use of medications prescribed by physician. Medications can be either quick relief, which are used in treating acute signs while long-term medications are used to control aggravation of the condition. The drugs are administered as metered-dose inhales but are sometimes available as dry powder taken by inhalation. These drugs have side effects such as mild regressions. For emergency attacks, other options such as magnesium sulphate and heliox are used (Barnes, Peter, & Godfrey, 2000). Literature Research Strategy Review on asthma drug noncompliance is significant since there has been increase in the number of noncompliant asthma patients. This has hindered realization of the benefits of using asthma drugs. It is thus important to understand the reasons behind the noncompliance as well as the importance of educating asthma patients on the importance of adhering to prescriptions (McDonald, 2002). Information on the level of drug noncompliance can be published in Cinahl, ProQuest, Medline, and Cochrane databases of systematic reviews. Medline has a simplified index on its journals thus this review would be more widely available if published in any of the Medline Journals such as the journal of American Medical Association. This is because the websites deal with medical related journals such as diseases. The searching keys words that can be used to find information on asthma include respiratory disease, Asthma, inhalation drug therapy, drug compliance, patient education. Information on asthma can also be obtained from online websites.  Coming up with a review entails finding details on the level of noncompliance, reasons behind noncompliance and how the issue can be resolved (Barnes, Peter, & Godfrey, 2000). Interventions to Reduce Drug Noncompliance The issue of drug non-compliance among asthma patients is very common and requires to be addressed. The issue should be published to help reveal the reasons why most asthma patients do not comply to doctors prescriptions.