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Abstract
Objective The aim of this study was to examine long-term trends in the receipt of medicines information (MI) among adult medicine users from 1999 to 2014.
Design Repeated cross-sectional postal survey from the years 1999, 2002, 2005 and 2008–2014.
Setting Each study year, a new nationally representative sample of 5000 Finns aged 15–64 years was drawn from the Population Register Centre of Finland.
Participants The range of annual respondents varied from 2545 to 3371 and response rates from 53% to 67%. Of the total responses (n=29 465), 64% were from medicine users (n=18 862, ranging by year from 58% to 68%).
Outcome measures Receipt of information on medicines in use within 12 months prior to the survey from a given list of consumer MI sources available in Finland.
Results Physicians, community pharmacists and package leaflets were the most common MI sources throughout the study period. Receipt of MI increased most from the Internet (from 1% in 1999 to 16% in 2014), while decreased most from physicians (62% to 47%) and package leaflets (44% to 34%), and remained stable from community pharmacists (46% to 45%) and nurses (14% to 14%). In 1999, of the medicine users 4% did not report receipt of MI from any of the sources listed in the survey, while this proportion had remarkably increased to 28% in 2014.
Conclusions Healthcare professionals and package leaflets had still a dominating importance in 2014 despite the growing number of MI sources over time, but still a minority of adult medicine users reported receiving MI via the Internet in 2014. Worrying is that the proportion of adult medicine users who did not receive MI from any of the sources became seven fold during the study period.
- medicines information
- medicines information sources
- population study
- repeated cross-sectional survey
- finland
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Footnotes
Contributors SH has been involved in designing the survey. SH and MSAA have been involved in developing the survey instrument concerning the receipt of medicines information. NM, MSAA, KH-A and MP-M planned the analysis and reported this particular study. These data were applied from the National Institute for Health and Welfare. NM performed the data analysis, and MSAA, KH-A, SH and MP-M contributed in the interpretation of the data. NM prepared the initial draft of the manuscript. MSAA, KH-A, SH and MP-M critically reviewed and revised the manuscript. All authors read and gave the final approval of the version to be published.
Funding This research was supported by the Elli Turunen Fund of the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
Competing interests None declared.
Ethics approval As this study was a secondary analysis using routinely collected and fully anonymised data, ethics approval was not applicable. Answering the survey was considered as giving informed consent. The study followed the national ethical guidelines for researchers. All study procedures were conducted in accordance with good research practice.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data sharing statement No additional data available.
Patient consent for publication Not required.