Development and Validation of a Health Behaviour Theory-based Questionnaire to Explore the Willingness of Older Adults and Informal Caregivers to Deprescribe

BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES Prescribing medication is an essential dimension in the care of the older adults (i.e. people aged 60 or 65 and over). However, the ageing process leads to physiological changes that can increase the risk of adverse drug events, and inappropriate polypharmacy can contribute to drug-drug interactions, lower medication adherence, significant costs to both the patient and the healthcare system, and also reduce people's ability to perform activities of daily living.

Therefore, it is important thinking about deprescription, defined by Reeve et al. (2022) as "a planned/ supervised process of dose reduction or the stopping of medicines that may be causing harm or conferring no additional benefit".

As implementation deprescribing requires a complexes changes to established patters of behaviors, understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying patient's and caregiver's behavior with respect to deprescribing, seems essential to improve the collaborative work between the patient, or even the caregivers, and the health professionals, to achieve the best health outcomes for the patient.

In reality, health behavior theories provides a series of concepts deriving from social, cognitive and motivational psychology, that can be useful in understanding why people behave in certain ways in relation to their health.

Screening Tools The patients' attitudes towards deprescribing (PATD) questionnaire, and its revised version questionnaire (rPATD), and Beliefs about Medicines Questionnaire (specific section) (BMQ-Specific) are 2 instruments widely used. However, this questionnaires don't consider critical domains that can be relevant to deprescribing, such as self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, subjective norms, health goals, environmental barriers and enablers, among others.