The Department of Health’s White Paper “Pharmacy in England: building on strengths – delivering the future” aims at utilising skills and reducing pressure on GP surgeries and hospitals. Pharmacists have a central role to play in helping the NHS and Social Services reduce the pressure on their resources and MTS is playing an active role in helping community pharmacists rise to the challenge by providing efficient multi-dose compliance packaging systems for medication management.

With the Paper’s emphasis on the management of medicines in a domiciliary environment, the maintenance of patients with long-term chronic illnesses such as asthma and treatments for minor complaints, the role of the pharmacist in the drugs supply and clinical services areas, is crucial. Advances in technology are helping release the pharmacist from their role as dispensers and remote monitoring (telehealth or e-health) initiatives are helping to free up care managers’ time while ensuring patient adherence. MTS is heavily involved in developing systems in all these critical areas of healthcare at the point of delivery to the patient.

We know that concordance support, when properly executed, really works. We offer complete monitored dose systems which enhance safety, security and efficiency of operations in the pharmacy and the care home, and domiciliary packaging solutions, enabling improved medicines management to help people live independently in their own homes longer.

It is so important that patients can get into the boxes and bottles that medicines are dispensed into. The problem sometimes is that there are so many medicines to take and sometimes patients can forget what they have taken or forget to take them all together.  Compliance packaging can alleviate many of these issues.

Our multi-dose compliance aids are designed as a weekly blister pack, divided into days of the week with several compartments per day to allow for different timing of doses such as breakfast, lunch, dinner and bedtime.

For the patient, they are easy to use and it is easy to tell if the patient has taken the right drug at the right time.

Studies show that better adherence to medication through such support ultimately leads to measurable and statistically significant improvements in the conditions of patients involved and can reduce the risk of hospital admission through non-compliance.

Cues to facilitate adherence

Clock time: ask the patient if they are usually aware of the time of day ie do they consult a watch or clock regularly? If the answer is yes, arrange a twice daily dose to be taken at specific times of the day (e.g. 7.00 a.m. and 7.00 p.m).

Meal time: ask the patient if they eat meals at a regular time of day. If the answer is yes, arrange medication to be taken at meal times.

Daily ritual: Ask the patient about typical daily routines e.g. tooth brushing, shaving, hair combing or walking the dog, picking up a newspaper. Link these to taking medication.

Adapted from “Enhancing patient compliance in the elderly. Role of packaging aids and monitoring.” Drugs and Aging. 1998; 12(1):7-15

As always, please consult a pharmacist or doctor before altering the dose pattern of medication for a patient.


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