Influence factors of medication awareness among patients with chronic diseases in Shandong province

Objective To examine influence factors of medication awareness among patients with chronic diseases in Shandong province and to provide references for promoting the patients to grasp right concept and rational application of medication.Methods With multi-stage stratified random sampling,we selected 1 518 households in Ji'nan,Ji'ning,Rizhao,Linyi,and Dezhou city in Shandong province for a questionnaire survey and recruited 516 residents with noncommunicable chronic diseases diagnosed within previous 6 month for a face-to-face interview on chronic disease medication and its related factors.Results Among the 516 patients,84.69% had medication for their chronic diseases and 67.31% had poor medication awareness.Of the patients,23.38%,24.94%,and 59.23% responded positively to the viewpoint of ‘therapeutic effect of new drugs being better definitely than that of conventional drugs’,‘expensive drugs being more effective than cheap drugs’,and combination of several drugs being better than having only one drug for disease treatment.Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that the patients doing agricultural work(odds ratioOR=2.969,95%confidence interval95%CI;1.716-5.139)and believing in medication advertisement(OR=3.048,95%CI:1.123-8.269)were more likely to have poor awareness of medication for chronic disease.Conclusion The medication awareness is poor and occupation and whether believing in medication advertisement are main influencing factors of the awareness among the patients with chronic diseases in Shandong province.