These diseases require patients to use medicines over a long term. This shows clearly that patients with chronic diseases are being hospitalized regularly when they could have been cared for in the home by doctors working outside the hospitals. (Bajcar, 2003).

             .

             When the patients are put on medicines, they should receive the maximum benefits from their medicines. For this purpose, the first point is the correct procedure of prescribing the medicine for the patient along with the dosing requirements. The second part is that these medicines have to be taken and this has to be done properly. This is generally decided by the patient. It has been seen in many instances that the process of preparing the prescriptions is not linked correctly to the process of taking the medicines. This often leads to the future hospitalization of the patient. During an analysis that was done recently it was seen that pf the total number of admissions to hospitals in recent times, 7.1% were directly caused by the medicines that were taken by the patient or the failure of the medicines to act or the medicines were not taken properly by the patients. Further it was seen that 59% of these admissions could have been avoided as the causes were due to inappropriate care or errors in medication. In medical terms, the adverse effects on patients are called drug related morbidity and mortality. The cost of drug related morbidity and mortality in United States during 1995 to the healthcare system was $76.6 billion. These costs have been rising at a very fast rate and the costs in 2000 went to a figure above the $177 billion mark. This also showed that hospital admissions related to drug related morbidity and mortality was now above 70% of the total costs. (Bajcar, 2003).

             The major cause behind this problem is the shortcoming in patient education as felt by the patients, though the groups of healthcare professionals at different levels are trying to give a lot of importance to it.