Promoting Treatment Adherence

As every health care provider knows only too well, poor patient adherence to treatment is an enormous barrier to effective health care delivery. Promoting Treatment Adherence provides health care providers with a comprehensive set of information and strategies for understanding and promoting treatment adherence across a wide range of treatment types and clinical populations. The information is presented in a practical how-to manner, and is intended as a resource that practitioners can draw from to improve skills in promoting treatment adherence. To facilitate ease of use for the practitioner, the volume is divided into five targeted sections. In the first section, the reader is provided with a general overview of the primary issues in treatment adherence relevant to practitioners. The second presents specific guidelines for assessing rates of patient adherence, as well as for assessing patient readiness to adhere to treatment and for identifying and understanding specific barriers to adherence in individual patients. In the third section, detailed guidelines for the implementation of each of effective strategies and techniques for facilitating patient adherence to treatment are presented, including motivational interviewing, patient education, skills training, increasing resources and support, problems solving, and relapse prevention. The fourth and fifth sections provide guidelines for the application of the information and strategies discussed in the previous sections to promoting adherence to a variety of specific treatments and with a variety of specific patient populations, with an emphasis is discussing considerations and issues specific to each treatment and patient population. Where applicable, each of the chapters presents a case-example as well as suggestions for further reading.