A compilation of Good Practices: Action Group on Prescription and Adherence to Medical Plans

A1 Prescription and Adherence to Medical Plans Group. A compilation of Good Practices: Action Group on Prescription and Adherence to Medical Plans. Brussels: European Commission; 2013. Available at:

Inappropriate prescription and poor adherence to pharmacological and non-pharmacological medical plans is an issue of public health concern. In its 2003 report on medication adherence, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated that “increasing the effectiveness of adherence interventions may have a far greater impact on the health of the population than any improvement in specific medical treatments".
Evidence also suggests that the use of drugs in older people is often inappropriate, not only because of the complexities of prescribing, but also as a result of those factors related to patients, to physicians, and to health care systems. Inappropriate prescription and poor adherence has also significant implications for the expenditures of healthcare and is estimated to incur costs of approximately €80 billion a year3.
Because barriers to medication adherence are complex and varied, solutions to improve adherence must be multifactorial.
The main aim behind this collection was therefore to ascertain which solutions were proving to be effective in overcoming some of the existing barriers to inappropriate prescription and adherence.
Another reason was to get information on what European Innovation Partnership's partners belonging to the Action Group A1 are working on, thus providing a broad picture of interventions undertaken at community level, in the hospital, clinical, and home settings, within research centres, and the academia, aimed at
better tackling adherence-related issues.
Finally, the good practices were collected also to provide valuable contribution to the current policy debate on how to achieve a more sustainable provision of care and to promote healthier lives among the ageing European population, therefore contributing to setting the scene for future work at EU level.
This booklet is a mapping exercise involving 30 partners, corresponding to 50 different organisations, which resulted in 75 initiatives being submitted, providing evidence and insights of recent experiences already implemented (or in their pilot phase).