Poorly sighted need help with meds

Aug 3 2012

By Caroline Price, Senior MedWire Reporter

GPs should check that elderly patients can see well enough to read prescriptions and tell different medications apart, warn UK researchers. They point out that many older patients with visual impairment need help to manage their medications.

Their study found that most visually impaired patients had difficulty reading medication information, while a quarter had difficulty distinguishing different tablets, particularly by colours.

As a result, visually impaired patients were nearly three times as likely as control patients without visual impairment to need help managing their medications, which they received mainly from relatives and friends.

Dr Margaret Cupples (Queen's University Belfast) and team studied a total of 314 patients (aged 65 or older) living within the community - 156 with visual impairment (best-corrected visual acuity from 6/18 to 3/60) and 158 closely matched control patients without visual impairment (best-corrected visual acuity of 6/9 or better).

Around half of patients in each group reported perfect adherence to their two or more prescribed medications, which was supported by prescribing data, Cupples and team note.

However, almost all (97%) of the visually impaired group had difficulty reading medication labels, despite most using optical aids, compared with just seven (4%) of the control group. And 38 (24%) of the visually impaired individuals had difficulty distinguishing medications, compared with none of the controls.

In line with these findings, 29% of visually impaired patients reported having help to manage their medication (19% from a relative or friend and 10% from the pharmacist in the form of a compliance aid), compared with 13% of the control group (10% relative/friend and 3% pharmacist), representing a 2.8-fold higher relative need for support.

"Greater efforts should be made to engage with patients to determine cost-effective ways of minimising problems due to variation in generic preparations and of designing more accessible packaging," the researchers comment in The British Journal of General Practice.

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