Peter S: Starting and changing medicines – Complex medication regimes (2)
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Peter S
Male
Age at interview: 60
Number of medicines: 18
Cultural background: Anglo-Australian
Peter S has a good relationship with his pharmacist, which helps when his medicines change. He has to be careful when doctors other than his usual GP or specialists prescribe something new.
Again with the chemist and the Webster-pak, if anything does change like occasionally my thyroxine gets changed or the warfarin gets changed … depends upon levels … I just ring him up and say ‘Hey [pharmacist’s name], he changed it from this to that’, so he then goes and makes sure the next pack is up to date, or if it needs fixing he'll fix it up. They home deliver it once a week free of charge … As I said mainly I ask questions, either directly to the doctor who's prescribing the medication or I go to a reputable site on the internet to find out, because I won't start a new medication unless it's from my GP or one of my specialists, so say I go to hospital one night and they decide I should be on so and so rather than this; I disregard it initially. I then either go online to make sure everything's all right, or I ring up my doctors and have a quick yarn to them and generally their answer is no, no, no, because as I said my … because of the antidepressant I'm on, the Cipramil, it took quite a while, about three weeks, to come up with one that wasn't going to cause major issues with my other tablets. So they don't want to upset the apple cart for the sake of change, yeah, even though some of the drugs they may suggest may be better but there's also risk that they may interact with the antidepressants and cause problems which I don't need.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.