| Summary: | With increasing number of prescribed drugs it has been shown a decreasing compliance to drug treatment [1]. The purpose of this work was to find out what kind of printed instruction patients used to support their drug treatment. Patients were interviewed at pharmacies, to find out how knowledgeable they were about and how many that had received information about prior dispensed drugs from The Swedish National Pharmacy Register. Interviews with prescribers have also been made to find out if and how they use The Swedish National Pharmacy Register. It can be useful, since patients visit many different physicians, and there isn´t a national patient record. In the register are all drugs recorded that have been dispensed during the last 15 months. 167 patients in 8 pharmacies participated in the study. 55 percent use a prescription list generated in the pharmacy from electronic transferred prescriptions. 13 percent of the patients used a list of drugs given to them at the by their physician. This list is generated from the patient record Only 2 percent of the patients interviewed use the drug list generated from The Swedish National Pharmacy Register as a source of information of witch drugs to use. The list of drugs, printed from the patient record and handed over by the physician ought to be the preferred list. A list to review the current drug treatment. More study is needed to answer the question why as low as 13 percent use the drug list. Information on all dispensed drugs from The Swedish National Pharmacy Register during the last 15 months is useful for physicians, since it´s the only source that gives the complete picture of the patients drug consumption. It can be useful for avoiding drug interactions, overconsumption of narcotic drugs, and improper drug utilization. The results from the interviews with the prescribers are based on responses from one out of five prescribers who had knowledge about the above list. The other four prescribers who participated in the telephone interviews, no one had knowledge about this drug list. More studies are needed to draw any conclusions. It seems that information is needed to prescribers about the drug list and its usefulness.
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