Hur apotekskunden hanterar och upplever sin ordination med delade tabletter

Old studies shows that prescribing of medications with split tablets dosages occurs in 10 % of all presciptions in Sweden. The aim of this study was to find out if any changes has happened since the old studies and if patients still experience difficulties with split tablets. Another aim is to study if there are any diffrences between how men and women experience dosages with split tablets. The method used was an interview study. Patients included were people with prescriptions of split tablets and people who collected prescriptions that included dosages of split tablets for some other person. Customers with prescriptions for animals were excluded. 171 patients with prescriptions of dosages with split tablets were interviewed. 34 patients experienced that they had problems with tablet splitting and of these patients were 68 % women. The most common problems were that the tablets were small and hard which resulted in different sizes of the tablethalfs and that the tablet crumbled. 49 % of the patients used their fingers to split the tablet into halfs. 31 % used a knife and 14 % used a tabletsplitter. The results of this study showed that 2,4 % of the prescriptions had a dosage with split tablets. The study shows that it is more common that women (65 %) split their tablets. Imovane 7,5 mg® is the most common tablet who is splitted. Most of the patients in this study have not considered any alternative to splitting tablets