Patient satisfaction with medication: a challenge for primary health care

Abstract

Good prescribing is a key issue in modern health-care systems: physicians and patients are concerned about outcomes, albeit from different perspectives, funding agencies are worried about costs and benefits and the pharmaceutical industry is interested in sales and customer satisfaction. Of all these, most research has gone into patient compliance and satisfaction. The theoretical basis of much of this research in recent literature is found in the theory of planned behaviour, an extension of the Theory of Reasoned Action that attempts to explain behaviour regarding medication in terms of beliefs about outcomes and the evaluation of these outcomes. 1,2 Furthermore, satisfaction with medication is related to broader issues, mainly to satisfaction with the services provided by the physician and the physician‐patient relationship, and to considerations about health-care delivery, accessibility and costs. 2 Starting from specific sections of the World Health Organization’s questionnaire on responsiveness of the health-care system, 3 supplemented with questions related to treatment, Geitona et al. 4 studied patient satisfaction with medication in Greece. They report that respondents were in general satisfied with all aspects of medication use examined except for costs. However, wide variations were observed in the levels of satisfaction between subgroups of respondents. The Greek study does not give us any information about the patients’ expectations from their medication or about the opinion of the physicians regarding their patients’ expectations, both of which seem to be strong determinants of prescribing. 5 Also, prescribing