Patient-tailored interventions are required – There is no single intervention strategy, or package of strategies that has been shown to be effective across all patients, conditions and settings. Consequently, interventions that target adherence must be tailored to the particular illness-related demands experienced by the patient. To accomplish this, health systems and providers need to develop means of accurately assessing not only adherence, but also those factors that influence it.
Adherence is a dynamic process that needs to be followed up –Improving adherence requires a continuous and dynamic process. Recent research in the behavioural sciences has revealed that the patient population can be segmented according to level-of-readiness to follow health recommendations. The lack of a match between patient readiness and the practitioner’s attempts at intervention means that treatments are frequently prescribed to patients who are not ready to follow them. Health care providers should be able to assess their patient’s readiness to adhere, provide advice on how to do it, and follow up the patient’s progress at every contact.
