Pharmacy Daily | Project urges CMI revamp

ONLY half of pharmacy patients want printed Consumer Medicines Information (CMI) for their medicines, according to the results of a two year study led by the University of Sydney. The study found that 44% of those surveyed indicated that they preferred verbal counselling rather than written information. 69% of study participants had received a CMI in the six months prior to the survey, with 38% having taken a CMI in the month before participation, and about half of those given CMIs were provided the leaflet directly by a pharmacist. According to the researchers, despite the fact that more consumers are aware of CMIs than they were five years ago, there are a number of improvements that can be made to leaflets to increase readability and useability. Designed to look into CMI effectiveness as well as to develop alternative CMI formats, the study found that ‘Limited time and CMI awareness, consumers’ understanding of the information, and overall poor perceptions of CMI, were “key barriers to provision and use”. Conducted under the Fourth Community Pharmacy Agreement, the study also found that “increased consumer awareness and demand for CMI as well as, increased consultation time and the availability of more comprehensible CMI and summary CMI were key facilitators to increased CMI use”. As a result of the study, the researchers developed several new CMI formats utilising information design, medicine info and functional linguistics. Performance tests of the new designs in select community pharmacies found that they were better received than the current CMI formats, with pharmacists reporting they found the new CMIs informative and were more likely to counsel patients to read them.

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