Objective:

To analyze the percentage of picked-up doses of oncologic drugs not included in the Essential Medicine List according to the medical prescribing service and the administration route of the drug in a third level hospital in Costa Rica.

Method:

Data was obtained by retrospective analysis from databases developed for the hospital's control of acquired drugs and from the dispatched drug registry.

Results:

Not all medications acquired through the special drug buying mechanism are picked-up by patients from the Oncology and Hematology Services. Overall, the pick-up rate was 90.3% for the 98 processes analyzed. Significant differences for the picking-up percentages were found for the medical prescribing service (t=-2.68; p=0.01) and the drug´s administration route (t=-2.61; p=0.01). Multivariate analysis shows that for the Medical Oncology Service, pick-up rate is significantly lower among divorced (ß=-4.7; p<0.01) and widowed (ß=-20.5; p=0.01) patients compared to married ones.

Conclusions:

Even when pick-up rates are not a way to measure therapeutic adherence, they allow to establish a primary relationship between the patient and its treatment. The underpicking of treatments found by this study shows the need to increase the research in order to understand patient´s reasons to abandon oncologic treatments that are not included in the Essential Medicine List.

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