This provides a new look at the way patients are asked about the effect of the prescription drugs they take. While questionnaires about effectiveness, side-effects or other concerns are common, how standardised are they, or can they be? That’s the question asked by this analysis of 15 different questionnaires for adults taking medicines for chronic disease. The study includes evaluation of the process of questionnaire development, degree of patient involvement and validation processes. It identifies a scarcity of comprehensive and generic measures of patient experiences with prescription medicines for chronic illnesses.
From the report:
“There is a scarcity of generic, patient-generated, psychometrically sound, comprehensive measures of the medicine use experiences of adult patients. Moreover, there is insufficient evidence for the routine use of existing measures in clinical practice. Therefore, there is a need for further development and/or validation of existing patient-derived, multi-domain instruments. In addition to their use in research, such tools may help individual patients to identify a range of medicine-related issues that impact on their day-to-day life and thus facilitate conversations with health providers in addressing those issues.”
“Measuring medicine-related experiences from the patient perspective: a systematic review.” By researchers from the UK’s Medway School of Pharmacy and Warwick Medical School, published 4 October 2016 in Dovepress.
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