Level of knowledge of elderly people about drug prescription: study in a basic health unit of a municipality in the State of Ceará, Brazil
International Journal of Development Research
Level of knowledge of elderly people about drug prescription: study in a basic health unit of a municipality in the State of Ceará, Brazil
Received 27th September, 2019; Received in revised form 09th October, 2019; Accepted 03rd November, 2019; Published online 30th December, 2019
Copyright © 2019, Maria Ravelli Cordeiro Xavier et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This study aimed to evaluate the knowledge of elderly patients in a primary health unit in the municipality ofPacajus, Ceará, about their drug prescription. To this end, the research followed the precepts of the inductive method, due to its empirical gender, based on field research. Regarding the objective, this is a descriptive exploratory study. Regarding the approach, it concerns quantitative analysis, whose technical procedure includes the survey of the leading drug prescriptions and the respective knowledge of these medical prescriptions by 115 older adults assisted in the aforementioned basic health unit. Regarding the data collection techniques, direct observation, interviews, and questionnaire-form were used. Regarding data analysis, descriptive statistics were used. It is concluded that more than half of the research participants had an insufficient or regular level of knowledge about the prescribed drugs. It is noteworthy that more than half of the older people investigated in this research are not prepared to take the medications entirely safely.
