Psychiatric patients' medication beliefs, knowledge, and the change that occurs after exposure to a medication education program

Patient education is an important aspect of patient care. Many recommendations have been made on approaches for maximizing the patient teaching process. Studies have examined the potential benefits of patient education. Increased compliance with therapeutic regimens, decreased patient stress due to an increase in knowledge of their disease and/or its treatment, improved patient/health provider relations, increased cost effectiveness, and possibly improved health status of the patient are manor benefits noted from patient education. In order to realize these benefits, program development and implementation must be directed at effectively changing patient health behavior. This would involve the incorporation of research information on health behavior and health behavior modification in the particular area of interest. These areas, however, are not yet fully researched. Conclusions on the most effective educational strategies have not been described. Thus, educational programs are empirically designed with guidance from currently available but suboptimal knowledge. Beyond proper development and implementation, evaluation and redirection of the teaching process toward maximal attainment of the program's goals is an essential part of a successful education program. The objectives of this study were twofold: 1) to conduct an evaluation a psychiatric medication education program by identifying psychiatric patients' beliefs and describing the change in these beliefs after exposure to the medication education program, and by measuring the change in knowledge these patient; and 2) to use this information to generate hypotheses for improved medication educational strategies.