Philip Morisky, MBA, Ξ’s Post

This validated scale is a simple four-question questionnaire: Do you sometimes forget to take your medication? Are you sometimes careless when it comes to taking medicine? If you feel better, do you sometimes stop taking the medicine? If you sometimes feel worse when you take the medicine, do you stop? If one of the questions is answered in the affirmative, the person is considered not to have complied. This scale has been applied for some time in other healthcare settings, but it has never been used in contraceptive counselling, where the URV hopes that, due to its proven effectiveness, its use will begin to become widespread. "If we know from the outset that a person will not follow the oral contraceptive compliance, that they will suffer from carelessness or lack of regularity, we will already know that they have to be advised on another contraceptive method," explains Inmaculada de Molina-Fernández, a midwife and researcher at the Department of Nursing at the URV, where they have been monitoring the users of the contraceptive counselling clinic for a year who had been given the MMAS-4 scale. This check has made it possible to verify the validity of the method. According to De Molina, 60% of the 327 participants in the study, who took or wanted to take combined oral contraceptives, were classified as non-compliant with the MMAS-4 scale and, after a one-year follow-up, "it was really found that they had more forgetfulness than the users classified as compliant." Universitat Rovira i Virgili the company called adherence. #medicationadherence #patientreportedoutcomes #mmas4 #continuityofcare #rwe