Purpose: To explore how elderly patients with chronic conditions identify and cope with suspected adverse drug events (ADEs) in northern China with the aim of encouraging the elderly to participate in medication safety monitoring.
Patients and Methods: A purposive sampling method was adopted to select 15 elderly patients with chronic conditions from a medical center in northern China for semi-structured-interviews, and the data were collated and analyzed through thematic framework analysis.
Results: Five major themes and 12 subthemes were refined, namely (1) lack of knowledge: poor awareness of the medications and ambiguous knowledge of ADEs, (2) barriers to identifying suspected ADEs: unawareness and uncertainty, seeking alternative explanations, and limited access to information, (3) the basis for identifying suspected ADEs: time cues and actively seeking communication (4) coping with suspected ADEs: cope with it themselves, not talking to the health care provider on their own initiative and actively seeking communication, and (5) expectations: desire for more reliable information and hope to be safeguarded for medication safety.
Conclusion: Due to the lack of relevant knowledge and limited access to information, the elderly were limited in identifying suspected ADEs, but they were positive towards participating in medication safety monitoring and hoped to obtain reliable medication information and detailed medication assessment by enhancing communication with medical professionals in order to achieve medication safety.
Keywords: the elderly, adverse drug events, medication safety, qualitative study