Niall: Starting and changing medicines – The need to change medicines
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Niall
Male
Age at interview: 45
Number of medicines: 7
Cultural background: British (Caucasian)
Niall needed the dose of several medicines to be adjusted before he and his doctors started to see some real improvement in his blood test results. A new GP was particularly proactive in this respect.
It was the metabolic syndrome and because the numbers were so high, my then GP also wanted me to see a gastroenterologist to investigate the fatty liver numbers and so on, but between the two of them, I was then put on statin and the metformin and, as I mentioned already, we made some adjustments about dosage for those and that's when we got some stabilisation and some improvements and, over time, continue to adjust to maintain improvement or continue bringing them down. My GP then and my gastroenterologist were happy with those numbers. It was only the change of GP that was an impetus to see if we can ramp up the improvements.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.