View article

The use of medicines by elderly people is a growing concern in social pharmacy and beyond. In particular, polypharmacy (the use of multiple medications) is common among the elderly but it may cause many problems such as an increased risk of inappropriate use of medications/drugs, adverse effects and non-adherence. In addition, polypharmacy increases medical costs. Moreover, increasing prices and the proportion of out-of-pocket payments in purchasing necessary pharmaceuticals may lead to situations where some older people refrain from buying prescribed medications. This non-adherence to medication use may cause serious problems to the health status of patients and increased cost to health-care systems in terms of additional hospital admissions. For instance, data from Australia suggest that at least 45,000 older Australians are hospitalized each year because of medication-related problems, representing 20–30% of unplanned hospital admissions for this age group. Therefore, the use of medicines in the elderly is a growing concern in the international scientific literature. Most studies in the field have focused on either medication adherence/nonadherence or accessibility to medications. To the best of our knowledge, few studies have evaluated medication nonadherence in Lithuania, and only one study has addressed medication use among the elderly. The accessibility to medicines is not a common research topic among Lithuanian researchers. This suggests, that there is a need of research in this area in Lithuania.