Investigation of Medication Use Safety for Elderly People and Research on its Relevant Methods

Abstract

Objective. Medication use safety is not only a matter of medicine, but a social concern to a great extent. The medication use safety of elderly people, a group that uses the most medicine on the most frequent basis, shall be paid high attention to by medicine field and the whole society. This article proposes some relevant methods of safe medication use for elderly people through their adverse drug reactions learned from the first affiliated college of our college. Method. Choose the elderly patients received and cured by the first affiliated college of our college due to adverse drug reactions from January, 2011 to January, 2012, and adopt a time point survey method to make an analysis on daily medicine types, disease occurrence degree classifications and organs/systems related to outcomes and adverse reactions, meanwhile ask elderly patients about the details of their medicine taking using questionnaires... In 250 elderly inpatients, there are 3-27 types of medicine taken, and (12.40±7.23) on average, among which 60 inpatients (24.0%) had severe adverse reactions, 136 (34.4%) of moderate ones and 54 (21.6%) of mild ones. Of 250 elderly patients, only 5 don’t take medicine at home (2.0%), 183 (73.2%) taking medicine by themselves and 67 (26.8%) taking medicine with the help of their children, spouses or housemaids. Conclusion. Adverse reactions severely harm elderly people’s life qualities, thus reasonable medication use guidance must be provided for them to reduce the occurrence thereof so that the safety and efficiency of medication use will be guaranteed.

Keywords

• adverse reaction
• Chinese traditional medicine
• reasonable use
• elderly people