Patient Treatment Adherence Concepts, Interventions, and Measurement

This book summarises the literature on adherence to recommendations for a range of specific health behaviours. It provides a comprehensive resource on the conceptualisation, intervention and measurement of therapeutic adherence and synthesises research on demographic and chronic diseases. The text presents issues related to therapeutic adherence; theoretical models that have been widely used to understand, predict and/or improve adherence; adherence to specific behaviours, including exercise, diet, rehabilitation, medication and psychological therapies; and strategies for increasing adherence. Each chapter is divided by disease to provide readers with easy access and includes a discussion of adherence for demographic and chronic diseases, a review of previous interventions targeting a specific behaviour or population, questions and scoring algorithms for commonly used measures of adherence to treatment recommendations, a discussion of clinical trials and, where appropriate, policy implications. Intended for health professionals, health, clinical, social and cognitive psychologists, primary care physicians, pharmacists and policy makers, this text is also an excellent resource for postgraduate courses in health psychology and public health.