Measurement of patient adherence to the use of ntihypertensive drugs by Mmas-8 nnd pill count in 5 primary health centres of surabaya

Patient adherence towards medication is an important health issue that the pharmacists need to give more attention to. In order to determine patient adherence to the use of antihypertensive drugs in 5 Primary Health Centres of Surabaya, a cross-sectional study was conducted on February 2015 by using accidental sampling technique. The adherence measurement was performed by using two methods: Pill Count (PC) and self-report using MMAS-8 which was proven valid and reliable. Patient adherence measured by PC detected 135 respondents (66.2%) who were non-adherent in taking the medicine. Meanwhile, MMAS-8 showed that 117 respondents (57.4%) had a low level of adherence. The correlation between patient adherences measured by the two methods could be observed after classifying the level of adherence in MMAS-8 into two categories: adherent and non-adherent. The reclassification result identified 87 respondents (42.6%) who were adherent to the use of antihypertensive drugs. Additionally, the Chi-square test showed that there was no correlation between the measurement results of the two methods (sig. 0.898 > á 0.05). Accordingly, it can be concluded that non-adherent patients identified by the PC and patients with low level of adherence according to MMAS-8 were on the highest number. Therefore, pharmacist as a health advisor has an important role in the improvement of patient adherence.