Patient compliance

Background: Treatment abandonment (TxA) is a primary cause of therapy failure in children with cancer in low-/middle-income countries. We explored the absence of social support network (SSN), among other predictive factors, and TxA in children with cancer in Cali, Colombia.

For development of spoken language, children need to consistently use appropriately fitted amplification. There is extensive variability in hearing aid use, particularly with younger children (Muñoz, Preston, & Hicken, 2014; Walker et al., 2013), and parents have reported challenges influencing how much children use their hearing aids including negative behaviors (Muñoz et al., 2015; Muñoz et al., 2016). Audiologists need to incorporate approaches to behavior changes with the families, which is often not a skill we have been trained to focus on.

Objectives: Importance of HSB is increasing being recognized in understanding patient compliance, adequacy of followup, and seeking of alternative therapies (AT), which impact glycemic control. We looked at HSB of T1D caregivers.

Methods: 56 families: Child's T1D duration >1 y, were interviewed: 49 coming to a private clinic, 7 in government hospitals. SES was low in 20, upper/middle ("non-poor") in 36.

Background: Having support from an informal carer is important for heart failure patients. Carers have the potential to improve patient self-care. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that caregiving could affect the carer negatively and cause emotional reactions of burden and stress. Dyadic (patient and informal carer) heart failure self-care interventions seek to improve patient self-care such as adherence to medical treatment, exercise training, symptom monitoring and symptom management when needed.

Objective: To describe ways family members assist adult patients with prescription medications at home, during medical visits and at the pharmacy. Methods: Online survey of 400 adults (caregivers) who help another adult (care recipient) with prescription medication use. Regression modeled the contribution of caregiver communication during recipients' medical visits, evaluation of physicians' medication communication and discussions with the dispensing pharmacist on caregivers' assistance with home medication management.

Those working with patients with diabetic foot wounds are well aware that individuals who take a considerable time to heal pose ongoing challenges for health care professionals and informal carers; cycles of breakdown, recurrent infections, pain management, and adherence to treatment all require regular reassessment, renegotiation of care goals, and review of care plans. Those patients with ulcers for many years are clearly hard-to-heal and often reach a state where the wound is 'static'-not always with any apparent reason.

This paper reports on a qualitative study analyzing service-user (SU) and carer perspectives on medication compliance and their experience of compulsory treatment. Eleven SUs and eight carers were interviewed. The research is set against the background of changes to mental health legislation in England, in the form of Supervised Community Treatment. This signals a change in community mental health practice and urges a reconsideration of concepts such as compliance, concordance and coercion.

Background: Most studies of exercise training for heart failure have been conducted on relatively young patients with little comorbidity. Such programmes are unsuitable for the majority of older frail heart failure patients.

Aims: To test the acceptability and tolerability of an outpatient exercise programme in older heart failure patients with comorbid disease.