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.