MOULTRIE —
Brian Elliott, RN, Colquitt Regional Medical Center’s director of oncology services, was recently featured in a national magazine article titled “Rx for success … Uping the Ante on Adherence.”
The article, which appeared in Cure Magazine’s Extraordinary Healers special edition for 2011, addressed the challenges of educating patients on the use of their drugs and ensuring that patients strictly adhere to the medication regiment.
“Elderly patients are more apt not to take their medicine as they are supposed to,” Elliott says, “but you have patients who have cancer, who might also be elderly, and the chemotherapy might also cause them to not be able to concentrate as well as they used to. There’s a phenomena called ‘chemo brain’ where people who take chemotherapy on a regular basis don’t have the ability to concentrate as well as they did before the treatment.”
Since there is no “one-size-fits-all solution for educating patients,” the article describes a method used by Elliott for one of his patients. Elliott says he prepares calendars for his patients who have a difficult time remembering their medications, but sometimes that is not enough.
“Every once in awhile we have patients who cannot even follow a calendar and that’s what the magazine article was addressing,” Elliott said.
In the article, Elliott describes the steps he took with one patient when the calendar method did not work.
“When the calendar didn’t work, I was forced to stop and think what else I could do,” Elliott said. “So I started having the pills delivered to me. Then I would set the pills up in a medication box. So, with the calendar and the medication box, she was able to take her prescriptions with amazing accuracy.”
Elliott says keeping up with their medicine regiment is particularly difficult for cancer patients since they are often having to take a number of different kinds of medicines.
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Brian Elliott.
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Oncology director featured in national magazine
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