'Moving From Hospital to Home' - Exploring the Impact of Care Transition on Medication Adherence in Cardiac Patients: a Qualitative Study Protocol

Background:

Medication adherence following acute coronary syndrome (ACS) is often sub-optimal. Poor adherence is associated with increased risk of rehospitalisation along with higher rates of morbidity and mortality. After a cardiac event, transitioning from hospital into primary care can be problematic if it is not organised or coordinated properly. Patients can often find themselves unprepared and lacking the necessary information for self-management of their disease. The impact of care transition on medication adherence has not been studied in ACS.

Objectives:

This study will explore how an ACS patients' journey from hospital into primary care affects medicines use. Further, to understand how medicine information is communicated and how this influences patient beliefs about medicines.

Methods:

This is an interview study with recently hospitalised ACS patients discussing medication beliefs, communication of medicine information and the challenges when transitioning from specialist to primary care. Patients will be recruited from Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust and telephone interviews will be scheduled 3-4 weeks post-discharge. An inductive thematic analysis will be used to identify, construct and analyse patterns in the data and to develop a framework analysis. Analysis will be an iterative process conducted in parallel with data collection to highlight when data saturation has been reached.

Dissemination:

The primary objective is to develop a pharmacist-led behaviour change intervention to improve rates of medication adherence following an ACS. The in-depth patient data collected in this current study will contribute to the design and development of the intervention. Understanding the research topic from the patients' perspective is a necessity when designing an intervention targeting behaviour change.