Implication
The findings of this scoping review presented important implications for practice, administration, policy, education, and future research. For practice, healthcare professionals need to integrate assessments of level, reasons, and factors that influence medication nonadherence into practice. They need to improving medication adherence and understanding factors that influence nonadherence behavior can enable healthcare professionals to identify interventions and improve the patient’s adherence behaviors and long-term health outcomes. Moreover, they should aim to maintain medication adherence through involvement healthcare professionals in providing medication adherence enhancing interventions to improve patients’ beliefs and behaviors, as well as use multi-faceted intervention and ongoing follow-up, which may assist patients in achieving greater long-term adherence to medication. Although should providing training for healthcare professionals on assessments of level, factors that influence medication nonadherence, communication skills, and provide continuous monitoring for patients. In addition, this scoping review confirms to formalization and integration of the adherence assessment process into routine practice and highlights the importance of multidisciplinary support required for a successful assessment of medication‐taking behavior.
For administration, this could be achieved by integrating and designing appropriate assessment measures and interventions regarding MDD and medication adherence. For policy, it should emphasize a collaborative effort of researchers, healthcare professionals, and stakeholders to improve medication adherence. Also, emphasize integrate statistics of medication adherence into the healthcare databases. This highlights to focus on and increase the number of medication adherence enhancing interventions that are supported by health care institutions. Also, develop a guideline for medication adherence measures, medication adherence enhancing interventions, and follow-up strategies.
For education, nursing students should be aware of the concept of adherence, the outcome of nonadherence, and the interventions of adherence. Particularly, measures, influencing factors, and types of medication adherence enhancing interventions should be taught in nursing programs. In addition, health nursing care plans may need to include medication adherence and self-monitoring assessment to be standard for students clinical practice. Therefore, nursing programs should focus on teaching students how to assess medication adherence.
The current scoping review could be extended and improved upon in several areas. For future research, we need research on nonadherence to medication among patients with MDD as well as interventions to promote patients’ adherence to treatment, as most of the research that was identified was recommended only in specific settings, diseases, treatments, and it included small samples of the study. The researchers could utilize rigorous methodological approaches and focus on investigating clinical features and factors that could influence medication adherence among patients with MDD. In addition, the researchers could utilize objective measures of adherence, and triangulation of methods is recommended that could give more naturalistic and precise findings. Future research can also explore and develop additional and new interventions to address factors that could influence medication adherence as well as the effectiveness of current efforts to enhancement adherence to medication among patients with MDD.