Providing medication information according to a patient's health literacy and communication ability is needed for safe and effective healthcare. Communication barriers due to hearing loss prevent pharmacists from providing medication information to patients with hearing loss. A questionnaire about the difficulty in understanding medication information and the feeling of inconvenience during medication education was conducted from September to October 2020 with 84 people with prelingual hearing loss and 346 pharmacists. The 84 hearing loss participants were divided into low- and high-scoring groups based on their understanding of medication use. Pharmacists did not realize that low-scoring group participants did not understand items with homonyms, abstract expressions about medication use and medical terminology. Pharmacists were also unaware that the low-scoring group felt the inconvenience in medication education because of the difficulty to communicate, inform not understanding medication information and consult about medication use with a pharmacist. Prior learning about hearing loss led to higher responses in recognition of the aforementioned issues. However, even pharmacists with prior experience of learning did not fully recognize that speaking out loud is not useful for effective communication and that hearing loss patients need contact methods other than the phone. This indicates the need to learn about hearing loss to improve provision of medication information and effective communication in medication education to people with hearing loss.
Keywords: communication; health literacy; hearing loss; inconvenience; medication education; pharmacist.