Atención Farmacéutica en pacientes que viven con el virus de inmunodeficiencia humana, atendidos en el Hospital General Machala IESS

Abstract

The terminology pharmaceutical care was adopted in the 1990s, and since then, Ecuador has been training competent health professionals in the pharmaceutical area. This term is defined as the active and continuous intervention of the biochemical pharmacist in patient care. Its importance lies in contributing to a better quality of life of the patient, in conjunction with the participation of other relevant health professionals and thus obtain favorable results such as: good adherence to treatments, and thus optimize the use of drugs and improve therapeutic outcomes. Based on what was described in this work, the pharmaceutical care provided to patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was evaluated with the review of pharmaceutical care forms and laboratory tests to measure adherence to pharmacological treatment. A descriptive, prospective and observational study with a non-experimental and cross-sectional design was conducted in HIV patients attending the General Hospital Machala, with the objective of determining whether HIV patients who received pharmaceutical care had a good pharmacological adherence to antiretroviral treatment. The patients were selected based on the inclusion criteria, so the study population consisted of 165 patients over 18 years of age receiving pharmacological treatment. To measure pharmacological adherence, direct and indirect methods were used. The indirect methods are the so-called adherence tests, which consist of questions with dichotomous answers given by the patient, and the direct methods consist of laboratory tests, which allow specific or confirmatory results to be obtained. The results obtained show that pharmaceutical care has a significant influence on patients' adherence to treatment, since the direct method showed that 98% of the patients were adherent and that of this total, the highest percentage of male patients was 99%, while the highest percentage of female patients was 96%; by the indirect method, 93% of the patients were adherent, and of this result, the highest percentage of adherence represented male patients with 94%, followed by females with 89%.