Medicine information needs of patients: the relationships between information needs, diagnosis and disease

Abstract

These findings suggest that the diagnosis and disease have a significant bearing on patients' medicine-information desires and recommend that healthcare professionals view patients as individuals when providing information that meets their needs. It will be important for healthcare professionals to identify and understand that patients with different diseases have different desires for information about their disease and their drugs which may influence the way they take their medicines and subsequently the ways we manage their long-term disease. We need to determine if the EID scale is an efficient and effective way to identify patients' desires for drug information and a useful tool for practitioners to effectively target interventions in healthcare provision over time.