OBJECTIVES: Compliance with the therapy is a major problem in modern healthcare where various factors become hindrance in perceived health benefits and positive outcome to treatment. The objective of this research was to assess the level of compliance, its factors and possible interventions that could be suggested to overcome non-compliance.

METHODS: There were 300 patients included in this study admitted in Nishter Hospital Multan, Pakistan. This retrospective study was performed by the approval of ethical committee of the institute. The data was collected in a specially designed Performa consisting of close-ended and some open-ended questions which were required to assess what exactly is the patient level of compliance.

RESULTS: In this survey, it was concluded that 73.3% of inpatient showed compliance to treatment, while 26.7% were non-compliant. 51.2% non-compliant patients (among 26.7%) claimed that they could not afford therapy, 18.4% patients had no regular time of taking medicine. 12.7% patients were young and careless, 9% patients were reluctant due to ADR’s while 8.7% patients had fear of drug dependence. The intervention that could be adopted for non-affording patients (51.2%) was the prescription of cost effective therapy. In young careless patients (12.7%), reluctant patients (8.7%), and patients with fear of drug dependence (8.7%) could be complied collectively by proper counselling about the disease, treatment therapy and its ADRs while in 18.4% non-complaint patients extended release formulation can overcome the dose frequency issue.

CONCLUSIONS: Patient non-adherence seems to be a major obstacle in rational use of drugs. Proper identification of the reasons to non-compliance is valuable for the quality improvement of therapy and appropriate intervention should be made so that goals of therapy can be achieved. Clinical pharmacist is cardinal entity to manage non-adherence by educating the patients along with HCP's about the necessity of compliance to therapy for improved health status.