May you never forget what is worth remembering: the relation between recall of medical information and medication adherence in patients with inflammatory bowel disease.

Background: Nurses play an important role in educating patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) about immunosuppressive or biological therapy during prescribing consultations. The education for immunosuppressive or biological therapy often contains complex information. Poor medication intake behavior can be a result of poor information recall, which is often caused by complex information.

Objectives: The aim of this study is to measure information recall by IBD patients, and to investigate the relationship between recall and medication intake behavior.

Methods: Data collection took place from September 2009 until March 2012. Eight nurses at six Dutch hospitals and 68 IBD patients participated in this study. Prescribing consultations were videotaped and patients completed surveys immediately after the consultation and after three weeks. Information recall was based on the actual communication in video recordings of the consultations. Medication intake behavior was measured by self-report.

Results: Issues most frequently discussed were side effects and how patients had to administer their medication. IBD patients could reproduce half of the information. Recall of medical information was a significant predictor for self-reported medication intake behavior (β=0.37, p=0.007), indicating that higher recall of medical information relates to improved self-reported medication intake behavior.

Conclusions: This study revealed a significant relation between IBD patients' recall and self-reported medication intake behavior. When educating IBD patients about their newly prescribed medication, providers should consider recall-promoting techniques to increase medication intake behavior.