Continued Dispensing: What medications do patients believe should be available?

© 2015 Abukres et al. Background. Continued Dispensing (CD) is a new medication supply method for certain medications in Australia. It aims to prevent treatment interruption as a result of patients' inability to obtain a new valid prescription. The only currently eligible patients for this serv...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Abukres, S., Hoti, Kreshnik, Hughes, Jeff
Format: Journal Article
Published: PeerJ Inc. 2015
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/27789
_version_ 1848752360355004416
author Abukres, S.
Hoti, Kreshnik
Hughes, Jeff
author_facet Abukres, S.
Hoti, Kreshnik
Hughes, Jeff
author_sort Abukres, S.
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description © 2015 Abukres et al. Background. Continued Dispensing (CD) is a new medication supply method for certain medications in Australia. It aims to prevent treatment interruption as a result of patients' inability to obtain a new valid prescription. The only currently eligible patients for this service are statin and/or oral contraceptives users who have been using these medications for 6 months or more, have not utilized the CD method during the last 12 months, and cannot obtain an immediate appointment with the prescriber in order to get a new prescription. This study aimed to investigate patients' attitudes towards potential extension and expansion of this medication supply method. Methods. A randomly selected 301 users of these medications from all Australian States were recruited using Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI). Result. The response rate was 79%. The majority of the participants (73.3%) did not agree with current restriction on CD utilization frequency. They also supported, to varying degrees, inclusion of all the proposed medications (support ranged from 44.2-78.4%). In this regard, participants who suffered from a specific disease did not differ significantly fromthose without the disease except in case of patients with depression (p = 0.001). Conclusions. Participants of this study strongly supported both CD extension and expansion. A future critical review of the current version of CD is highly recommended in order to enhance CD capability to achieve its goals.
first_indexed 2025-11-14T08:07:23Z
format Journal Article
id curtin-20.500.11937-27789
institution Curtin University Malaysia
institution_category Local University
last_indexed 2025-11-14T08:07:23Z
publishDate 2015
publisher PeerJ Inc.
recordtype eprints
repository_type Digital Repository
spelling curtin-20.500.11937-277892017-09-13T15:13:26Z Continued Dispensing: What medications do patients believe should be available? Abukres, S. Hoti, Kreshnik Hughes, Jeff © 2015 Abukres et al. Background. Continued Dispensing (CD) is a new medication supply method for certain medications in Australia. It aims to prevent treatment interruption as a result of patients' inability to obtain a new valid prescription. The only currently eligible patients for this service are statin and/or oral contraceptives users who have been using these medications for 6 months or more, have not utilized the CD method during the last 12 months, and cannot obtain an immediate appointment with the prescriber in order to get a new prescription. This study aimed to investigate patients' attitudes towards potential extension and expansion of this medication supply method. Methods. A randomly selected 301 users of these medications from all Australian States were recruited using Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI). Result. The response rate was 79%. The majority of the participants (73.3%) did not agree with current restriction on CD utilization frequency. They also supported, to varying degrees, inclusion of all the proposed medications (support ranged from 44.2-78.4%). In this regard, participants who suffered from a specific disease did not differ significantly fromthose without the disease except in case of patients with depression (p = 0.001). Conclusions. Participants of this study strongly supported both CD extension and expansion. A future critical review of the current version of CD is highly recommended in order to enhance CD capability to achieve its goals. 2015 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/27789 10.7717/peerj.924 PeerJ Inc. fulltext
spellingShingle Abukres, S.
Hoti, Kreshnik
Hughes, Jeff
Continued Dispensing: What medications do patients believe should be available?
title Continued Dispensing: What medications do patients believe should be available?
title_full Continued Dispensing: What medications do patients believe should be available?
title_fullStr Continued Dispensing: What medications do patients believe should be available?
title_full_unstemmed Continued Dispensing: What medications do patients believe should be available?
title_short Continued Dispensing: What medications do patients believe should be available?
title_sort continued dispensing: what medications do patients believe should be available?
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/27789