Reporting of non‐prescribed medication usage in remote Australia: health‐seeking habits in Port Headland

Abstract

Studies have indicated that the emergency department is the third most common site of hospital adverse eventsmany attributed to negligence. 1 Because the emergency department is their first point of contact, large numbers of people are potentially exposed to mostly preventable adverse events. Further studies have indicated that the phase in care where most adverse events occur is during the medical examination and history taking. 2 Clinicians in the emergency department of Port Hedland Hospital reported concern that individuals attending the emergency department were not reporting use of nonprescribed medications. Given that non-prescribed medications have the potential to cause adverse drug reactions and complementary and alternative medicines are used extensively by patients who attend Australian emergency departments, 3 we sought to determine the usage of non-prescribed medications and people's willingness to report their use in a remote town. Non-prescribed medications included bush medicines, complementary and alternative therapies and over-thecounter medicines.

Health priorities in an Australian mining town: an intercept survey

“…They were also asked about medication use, where they accessed medications and their knowledge of potential drug interactions, and whether they would be able to describe what they had taken. The health-seeking behaviour results have been reported elsewhere 5 . Data were entered into IBM SPSS (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/analytics/spss/) for analysis.…”