Karen: Keeping a medicines list – Electronic and paper-based lists
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Karen
Female
Age at interview: 37
Number of medicines: 8
Cultural background: Anglo-Australian
Karen keeps a paper-based medicines list in case she needs an ambulance. She also uses a free app that includes reminders and can keep a record of how she feels and what pain medication she has taken.
And the app on my phone helps and I do add into that when I've taken extra stuff, so there's a thing on the app that you can then sort of do a report thing ... but I just look back over it before I go back to my doctor’s and see, ‘Oh, well, how often have I been taking extra stuff or not?’, which has been really helpful, because ... you know ... it's easy to remember how you feel today and last week, but it's also very easy to feel like, ‘I've felt this crap forever.’ So, as I said, I find the medication to be a nice concrete way of ... an indicator of how I'm feeling or how I'm going.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.