Hypertensive Patients Compliance with Medications in Marjan Teaching Hospital/ Babylon

Abstract

Hypertension is a major public-health challenge worldwide and one in every three adults has high blood pressure poor or noncompliance produce uncontrolled hypertension that will lead to more complications. The objective of this study is to evaluate compliance of hypertensive adults with their treatment, this is a descriptive cross sectional study was conducted at the medical consultation clinics of Marjan Teaching Hospital during the period from January through July 2013, 323 hypertensive patients aged over 25 years were interviewed and assessed using a special questionnaire format based on Morisky 8-Item Medication Adherence Scale. Weight, height , and blood pressure were measured. The study showed that mean age of patients was 51.28 ± 9.81 years. Good compliance with treatment was present in only 24.8% of the sample and 57.9% had poor compliance. Nearly 90% of patients tend to measure their blood pressure at governmental clinics, 34.1% do not remember their last blood pressure reading; 33.4% do not know the normal reading and 21.3% tend to measure their blood pressure every 3 months or more and good control of blood pressure was present only in 22.3% of patients. In conclusion the study revealed a low rate of medication compliance and low level of blood pressure control with strong association between them. Compliance increased with higher level of education, presence of complication, longer duration of disease and the use of single medication.