INFORMATION FOR PEOPLE ABOUT MEDICINES:
IS IT REALLY HARD TO SWALLOW?

Situation: Patients, doctors, pharmacists and nurses must receive visual information about medicines. Without instructions, warnings and risk-benefit information, it is not possible to prescribe, dispense, or take medicines appropriately. Research shows that 50% of medicines for chronic illnesses are not taken effectively; that the costs of medicines are already substantial and are increasing by about 11% every year; and that the number of hospital admissions and fatal accidents caused by medicines are significant (It is estimated that every day, 1 person per million inhabitants dies because of an accident directly related to medicines).

Problem: Patient involvement in the development and design of package leaflets is obligatory in the European Union. This involvement should guarantee that the text and the design of package leaflets is ‘comprehensible and easy to use’. Unfortunately, the legislation also prescribes that all information about medicines must be identically structured. This causes a conflict when patients prefer a different structure or a different approach. A second fundamental problem is that other groups – doctors, nurses, pharmacists – are not obligatory involved. A third problem is that the legislation only focusses on package leaflets and ignores other methods to supply information.

Approach: User observations and contextual inquiries in hospitals, in pharmacies and in domestic situations are undertaken with the aim to build a collection of ‘user experience models’.  These models provide a basis for design developments and structure the involvement of stakeholders.

Results: The investigations show that people have difficulties in handling medicines safely and effectively. The visual design of the information is likely to be one of the fundamental causes of these difficulties. Confusable medical packaging, poor instructions, hard to read package leaflets, conflicting warnings are common when the design of information about medicines is analysed. People can very clearly indicate which situations are problematic and what is ‘best practice’. The majority of designed information does not seem to cause severe problems, but could be improved. A minority is fundamentally flawed and needs urgent attention.

Conclusion: The contextual inquiries, user observations and diagnostic tests indicate that the design of information about medicines for doctors, pharmacists, nurses and patients is highly problematic in some specific situations. The design of information benefits if it is based on sturdy user experience models. The most effective results are achieved when all information resources are considered and when all stakeholders are involved.