Assessment of Medication Adherence Using Malaysia Medication Adherence Assessment Tool in a Tertiary Care Hospital in Peshawar, Pakistan

To assess the adherence to medications using Malaysian Medication Adherence Assessment tool in patients
suffering from chronic health conditions admitted in a tertiary care hospital.

This cross-sectional study was carried out at in the Department of Internal Medicine, Hayatabad Medical
Complex, Peshawar, from 1st January to 31st March, 2023. All the patients admitted having chronic medical conditions
were included, using convenient non-probability sampling technique. Medication adherence was assessed by adopting
Malaysia Medication Adherence Assessment Tool using five-point Likert scale.The higher the score, the better the
adherence with the medications with a mean cut-off of 54 for the poor and good adherence. All the variables were analysed
and respective frequency and percentages were calculated. Non-compliance with the medications was compared and
correlated with rest of the variables by using chi-square test and p-value ≤0.05 was considered as significant.

A total of 201 patients were included having mean age of 56.27 ± 16.48 years, with 108 (54.2%) females and
92(45.8%) males. The general frequency of non-adherence was observed in 59%. The mean MyMAAT Score cut-off of ≤
53 (poor adherence) for the non-compliance was reported in all the included individuals. Further stratification of the non
compliance was analysed for age, acquired education, monthly income, profession and gender and we observed no
statistically significant difference.

We observed a high prevalence of medications non-adherence in our limited pilot study and requires large
multi-centre studies with good representation from all segments to know the factors causing non-adherence, guiding the
further strategies for improvement.