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.