Take Home Medications are a Big Help to Seniors

The news source is Reuters and the study was conducted by St. Michael's hospital in Toronto, Canada. In a study being published in the Journal of the American Medical Association revealed that most of the senior citizens admitted in the hospital often go home forgetting the prescription of their medicines.

Take home medications like cholesterol-lowering statins (Simvastatin), blood thinners (Aspirin), and asthma inhalers (Turbuhaler) are very much of a big help especially to senior citizens with chronic medical issues. Most of the multiple drugs need a prescription that has to be renewed if it is for long-term treatment. However, a good number of the senior citizens put themselves at risk to be back in the emergency rooms or worst be dead solely because of not having their prescribed medications with them.

In the study, the researchers used medical records for nearly 400,000 elderly people in Ontario to see how often those people left the hospital without renewing prescriptions for five long-term medications. They then compared those who'd been admitted with those who hadn't over the period from 1997 to 2009. Also, they compared those who failed to get a renewed prescription for aspirin within three months.

The result revealed that 19 percent of the seniors who had been hospitalized failed to do the chore and of those who were not admitted was less than 12 percent. As for the other medications, the difference was less pronounced but still, there were patients who landed in the intensive care unit.

According to the researchers, although the study can't prove that hospital stays caused patients to drop their medications, they had taken measures to ensure that in most cases the discontinuation was unintentional since majority of the seniors are on multiple drugs and unconsciously may not notice that a prescription hasn't been renewed after they leave the hospital.

Also, they pointed out the importance of better communications at the hospital and that the use of electronic patient records to be a big help. Other medical professionals note that landing in the hospital can be a good chance to adjust people's drugs and help them change their lifestyle since a miscommunication or simple error committed may cause potentially deleterious effects on the patient's health.

In relation to the study, it is very important to somehow recheck the understanding of the patient when it comes to giving instructions prior to their discharge as to avoid the unwanted another admission. With that in mind, it is an advantage for the patient and to the immediate family to have insurance all the time. In any case there is none, you can always find a good website with a huge database of quality and trusted companies; have all your queries and doubts regarding the advantages of having one, act on it now and prepare for the future.

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