Assessment of treatment adherence in persons with mental illness: Testing of a Tool

Maintaining adherence to prescribed treatment adherence is one of the issues in caring a person with mental illness. Treatment adherence can be measured by the patients’ interview or/and observation by the care givers. An objective measure of treatment adherence is equally important with self report especially for the patients requiring long term treatment. The present study aimed to develop a valid and reliable checklist to measure the treatment adherence of person with mental illness. Method: An 18-item checklist was constructed following the scientific tool development process. Content validity was established with validity index. The psychometrics of the checklist was evaluated with 110 family members of persons suffering from mental illness on their observation of treatment adherence of their patients. A standardized tool namely Medication Adherence Rating Scale (MARS) was also applied to the patients with mental illness to measure the same construct. Results: The statistical analysis showed good internal consistency of the constructed checklist. The chronbach’s alpha was found to be 0.789 and reliability with spearman brown prophency formula was 0.834. All the items except item no. 5, 7, 15 and 16 are significantly correlated with total score indicating sensitivity of the tool. There was significant correlation ( r=0.590, p=0.000) between the score of the constructed treatment adherence checklist and the score of MARS indicating good construct validity of the checklist. Conclusion: The constructed treatment adherence checklist was found to be valid and reliable to use in the research studies by considering its acceptable psychometrics.