Oral Presentaton Abstracts

Indian Journal of Palliative Care ¦ Volume 24 ¦ Issue 2 ¦ April-June 2018 208 of the disease with adherence. However, non-adherence increased with increase in duration of treatment (mean treatment duration of 4.63 versus 7.23 months (p < 0.04) for adherent and non-adherent respectively). Of the patients prescribed morphine, 62.16% (46/74) were non-adherent and 4.05% (3/74) were misdosing. Of note was the finding that 93.48% patients non-adherent to prescribed morphine had mild pain on treatment. However, 60.56% (43/71) of patients prescribed tramadol were compliant and of the non-adherent patients, 70% had mild pain. Only 9.46% (7/74), and 8.45% (6/71) of patients taking morphine and tramadol respectively, took prescribed SOS doses. 35.43% (45/127) patients taking paracetamol were non-adherent and 12.6% (16/127) were misdosing. The most common reason for non-adherence was found to be satisfactory pain control (33%), and that for misdosing was overlapping of prescription from different departments (9.03%) and misunderstanding prescribed doses (9.03%). Conclusion: Pain is a symptom, very well and only appreciated by the patient, unlike objectively measurable entities or signs in other chronic diseases. This different character demands different treatment. A patient in severe pain will demand analgesics and forget or avoid the same when it is tolerable, as deciphered through this study. Thus pain prescriptions should be flexible, informing the patients of which drugs to increase and also which to decrease in case of increased or reduced pain respectively to match the dynamic character of pain. Also, proper patient education and interdepartmental prescription vigilance finds importance in preventing the patient from harmful misdosing while undergoing multidisciplinary management.