Design of Medicines Packaging for Patients

Research Theme: Healthcare Design

Many patients take a combination of different medicines. Especially when patients have to stick to more complex medication regimens, adherence can become difficult. Some patients also experience difficulties when trying to access their medicines. In order to help patients to store and take medicines correctly, manufacturers are seeking to adopt patient friendly design methods. This project aims to define what these are and how they can be achieved.

Motivation

When designing medicines packaging, there can be a danger of merely striving to comply with regulations and aiming to make packaging safe in a way that would avoid potential litigation, without however taking into consideration the patients’ actual needs and concerns.

The aim of this project is therefore to gain an insight into real patients’ everyday lives, their habits, behaviour and attitudes regarding their medication, in order to base as many of our design decisions as possible on actual patient experience.

In practice this would mean investigating how medicines are being used and stored in the home. This includes for example, examining the complicated and often chaotic structures of the daily lives of patients and other members of their households. Furthermore, it entails observation of patients’ general health behaviour and its relation to medication adherence, especially where more complicated drug regimens are involved.

If we want to reduce risk and patient error, we need to understand how patients cope, for example, with polypharmacy and whether the patients’ coping mechanisms might compromise or potentially even completely circumvent safety mechanisms that have been put into place by the designer.

Objectives

  • Allowing informed design decisions, which are directly based on actual patient experience, to be made.
  • Promoting understanding of how design changes may affect medicine taking and storage in everyday live.
  • Providing a scoping instrument to measure the nature and extent of patient concerns.
  • Enabling designers to produce ‘patient friendly’ packaging, based on empiric evidence.

Method

This project will act as a scoping exercise, ultimately aiming to obtain a better understanding of how medicines are generally being used and stored in the patient’s home, in order to let actual patient experience influence design decisions.

To achieve this, it is crucial to involve patients, their families, carers, pharmacists and other medical personnel on a variety of different levels. This will initially be realised through qualitative methods, such as interviews and observations, as well as questionnaires and self-reports.

The findings obtained from those may ultimately lead to a more detailed risk assessment than we have at present of the use of medicines at home.

Details

UK and European regulations on medication packaging and labelling are continuing to evolve and transform. One current example of this is, for instance, the requirement for all medicines to carry their names on the labelling in Braille by the end of October 2010.

More focus is being put on patient safety and the need to avoid medication error in the home, as well as in hospitals and care homes. In addition to this, much greater emphasis is being put on developing ways of improving patient adherence to treatment regimens through the aid of labelling and packaging design.
In light of this, many manufacturers of medicines and other pharmaceutical products are changing their packaging in order to comply with regulations and standards.
At the same time however, there is only a limited amount of existing knowledge as to how fully we actually understand the direct impact that packaging design and design change have on patients.

Whilst pharmaceutical companies are beginning to view the patients, rather than the distributors and pharmacists, as their customers and hence, effectively users of medicines, there still appears to be a great need to actually understand what takes place in the patient’s home, outside of a controlled research environment.
Although there certainly is a trend to collate more information on the patient as the end user of medicines, and to design medicines packaging in a patient friendly way, it is still not always clear, what the term ‘patient friendly’ actually refers to or how it has been established.

There often is a risk of assuming that we already know what the patients’ needs are and that we therefore know how to design packaging in the patients’ best interest, yet possibly without having done enough extensive research into the patients’ general health behaviour, their daily activities at home and most importantly, the patients’ approach towards storing and taking their medicines.