An R428 Your Pals Is Raving About
13 The availability of drug allergy cards or bracelets which contain drug names and their allergic symptoms, do help patients to remember and prevent future exposure to the allergic drugs especially when patients are unable to communicate.12 Pharmacists could encourage patients to always carry and present their drug allergy cards during routine service, while JQ1 intensive counseling at the first exposure of drug allergy may provide better understanding in allergic drugs and other drugs with similar pharmacologic activity, mechanisms of drug allergy, and characteristics of allergic reactions to patients and family members, enabling greater understanding to prevent further occurrences.12,13 Our study suggests that educational brochures should be provided for all drug allergy patients to promote knowledge and understanding of drug allergy, whereas pharmacist counseling should focus on patients with poor knowledge and behaviors related to drug allergy. There were a number of limitations in the present study. Firstly, the questionnaire required patients to retrospectively complete information about their selleck screening library history of drug allergy. Therefore, especially in Group 1 patients who were recruited from the records on hospital database, might have had difficulties in recalling their allergic experiences. Despite the reminding by telephone and/or postcards were undertaken, recall bias may discourage patients to return mailed questionnaires and have contributed to the low response rate of baseline questionnaires in Phase 1 study (38.8%). Nonetheless, this was similar to the response rate of mailed questionnaires in a previous study involving Thai patients (42.0%).20 E-64 This may have resulted in a biased sample, with higher interest and thus knowledge of drug allergy. Secondly, some information required for questionnaire validation, especially physical examinations, may have been recorded incompletely on patients�� medical profiles, making assessment of the accuracy of patients�� reports difficult. Thirdly, patients were derived from different populations and were not randomly allocated to groups. Nonetheless, characteristics of patients in both groups did not differ significantly in all key measures with the exception of the availability of drug allergy cards. Finally, although it was instructed that Group 1 patients must read brochure before completing the follow-up questionnaire, their actual compliance in doing so could not be assessed and the observed improvement in mean total knowledge score could not with certainty be as a result of receiving the brochure. Prospective studies of longer duration should be performed to assess the long term efficacy of both these and other interventions in improving patients�� knowledge, actual behaviors and allergy recurrence rate.
