Mental health articles

Making a difference in medication self-management

The skills and interventions that enable service users to evaluate and develop skills in medication self-management have a wide evidence base. There are key skills, a range of strategies and interventions that are available to engage the person in developing a dialogue that facilitates the service user’s understanding and decision-making. These strategies will be discussed in a later chapter but include looking at a person’s beliefs about medication, using timelines to explore past events and future aspirations, their attitude to taking or not taking medication, evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of medication, and problem solving. Using the services user’s experience of what treatments work and what treatments should be avoided, advanced directives can be utilised in times of crisis to direct interventions when a service user may lack capacity to communicate his or her treatment wishes.

Tags: medication, self-management