4.3 Adherence
Several previous studies were done to evaluate the effect of education on adherence. Unlike ours, Ibinda et al. (2014) found no significant difference between the control and intervention group with regard to adherence, either by monitoring AEDs’ blood levels or self-reported adherence. Adherence increased significantly in both groups and this may be due to sharing knowledge between participants as reported by the authors (22).
On the other hand, the results of our study are consistent with the results of previous ones that emphasized the positive effect of education on adherence to AEDs in intervention group. Ma et al . (2019) found that adherence increased from 56% to 73.9% after education (24), and Tang et al (2014) also found an increase in patients with high level of adherence after education from 7.5% to 60.4%, and the overall percentage of patients that their adherence increased were 62.3% (P-value <0.0001) (9). Fogg et al . (2012) also reported a significant increase in patients reporting adherence and never deviating from administering medication after education provided by a pharmacist (P -value <0.03) (26). These results indicate that patient’s or caregiver’s level of adherence to medications for his/her family member can be increased significantly by providing information through an appropriate method of education, and the clinical pharmacist can be the provider of this education material. The clinical pharmacist has the ability to establish an administration schedule and record of medication administration, and follow up with patients regarding their medications and treatment plan. Interestingly, adherence at follow-up was significantly correlated with QoL which indicates that a better adherence is associated with a better QoL.