Public Health Campaign for Medicine Use
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Should "Medicine Use" be part of the lifestyle Public Health Campaign?
IRAS ID
178688
Contact name
Mahsa Ranjbar
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Hertfordshire
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 0 days
Research summary
Public health is the science and art of promoting, protecting health and well-being, preventing ill-health and prolonging life through the organised efforts of society. Whether policy makers and practitioners can achieve this depends upon their ability to accurately identify and define public health problems. In the past decade, there has been a growing recognition of the scope and magnitude of patients failing to take their medicines as prescribed, resulting in various degree of treatment failure causing substantial loss both in life quality and financial resource (York Health Economics Consortium and the School of Pharmacy, U. o. L. (2010)).
One of the ways to raise public awareness about “Medicine Use” concept is by including it in a lifestyle public health campaign. The aim of this research is to investigate the perception of the general public and health care providers about this approach. Based on the findings, an educational “Medicine Awareness Campaign” (MAC) will be developed and implemented and its impact on public awareness will be evaluated. The view of health care providers on delivering MAC will also be sought. MAC will be developed in line with the national initiative lifestyle campaign “Make Every Contact Count” (MECC) (Mooney, H., 2012 ). The latter approach includes health care providers at all levels to interact with members of the public are giving simple lifestyle messages such as smoking cessation and signposting them to specialists for further public health interventions.
To deliver this campaign it is vital to use mass media such as posters and leaflets. Consequently, this can increase awareness and knowledge about use of medicine and potentially signpost people to the services available in the NHS thorough pharmacies and general practitioner surgeries. Furthermore, it could potentially support better use of medicines, reduction of hospitalisation and prevention of medicine waste.
References:
Mooney, H., 2012, Doctors are told to “make every contact count” to reduce costs of poor lifestyles: BMJ, v. 344.
York Health Economics Consortium and the School of Pharmacy University of London, (2010), Evaluation of the Scale, Causes and Costs of Waste Medicines.REC name
East Midlands - Nottingham 2 Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/EM/0147
Date of REC Opinion
25 Mar 2015
REC opinion
Unfavourable Opinion