Helen: Travelling with multiple medicines – Maintaining medicines routines
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Helen
Female
Age at interview: 58
Number of medicines: 10
Cultural background: Anglo-Australian
Helen explains how she prepares for the impact of international datelines when she takes her medicines.
Helen:
It's always an interesting thing when you're travelling overnight on a plane or over, say, up to 36 hours. Having some sort of routine to keep medications happening at the times they should happen. I kind of do that pretty well, but I know I'm slightly out of kilter. But it doesn't seem to make any difference in the end.
Jacqueline:
How do you do that?
Helen:
Actually, right … I try to work on a 24-hour clock basis, and try and sort it out so that this would be the time I would normally take something, and get into a routine like that. Then have a little bit of a gap generally to get into the time of the country I'm in. So that I'm not changing my routine so much that I'm not likely to remember what I'm doing. I need to have the same routine as at home.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.