Prescribing & Medicines Management
Issue no 3, p4
May/June 2003

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Measure the benefits of concordance

Health professionals involved in implementing a partnership approach to medicines taking have been offered a new toolkit that aims to measure the impact and benefits of the approach.

The toolkit has been developed by the Task Force on Medicines Partnership, and is said to offer a step-by-step guide to evaluating interventions designed to boost concordance with medicines taking. The guide covers many of the steps necessary to monitor whether or not an intervention is having an impact, including how to set robust and clear objectives, assessing costs and measuring outputs and outcomes using qualitative and quantitative methods.The toolkit comes with a series of documents online that can be downloaded and modified for use locally in a range of different settings.

For example, a number of "scales" have been developed to help healthcare professionals assess the degree to which concordance is being achieved with patients: measuring health care professionals' attitudes to concordance; patient satisfaction with medicines information; and methods to measure compliance and other outcome measures practically.

Launching the toolkit, Geraldine Mynors, project manager, said that she hoped the availability of the toolkit would help improve the evidence base supporting the implementation of concordance.

She added: "Many services are developing which aim to involve patients as full partners in prescribing decisions through the provision of better medicines information, a different style of consultation and practical support for taking medicines. However, evidence of the impact of these developments on improving patient compliance, satisfaction and ultimately health is still patchy."

To obtain a copy of the toolkit, telephone the Medicines Partnership on 0207-572 2746 (or visit here).