Do themes in consumer medicines information literature reviews reflect those important to stakeholders?

Abstract

Objective: To compare the themes emerging from a stakeholder workshop on consumers' medicines information with themes in relevant published reviews.

Methods: A stakeholder workshop was held to permit consumer orientation of a systematic review of consumer medicines information. Analysis of the workshop outputs was compared to a content analysis of the identified published reviews.

Results: The workshop generated a range of responses inductively grouped into 12 over-arching themes. No reviews tackled all of these themes, nor addressed 'informed choice and autonomy'. More recent reviews reflected more workshop themes than older ones, suggesting a temporal trend towards a greater sensitivity to consumer issues. The most common workshop themes were covered by all reviews. Six themes in the reviews were related to traditional professional concerns including compliance, which did not arise in the workshop.

Conclusion: The results highlight a mismatch between the themes in previous published reviews and the themes emerging from the workshop. The most commonly reflected themes in reviews conform to the 'patient education' model of discourse, while workshop themes less often echoed in reviews reflect the discourse of 'patient empowerment'.

Practice implications: The findings suggest the importance of involving patients in the development of patient literature from the outset.