Patients' Attitudes Towards Deprescribing and Associations With Patient-Related Factors Across Two Hospital Settings

Medication deprescribing is a targeted strategy to reduce inappropriate polypharmacy. Patients in primary care settings have reported high willingness to discontinue medications, but this phenomenon is less well studied in hospital settings. In this explorative post hoc analysis of two previously described clinical trials, we assessed patients' attitudes towards deprescribing in two hospital-based cohorts: acutely admitted older medical patients (≥ 65 years) in the emergency department at Copenhagen University Hospital Hvidovre (October 2018–April 2021) and multimorbid patients (≥ 18 years) referred to an outpatient clinic at Copenhagen University Hospital Amager (March 2019–December 2019). Among 104 and 72 patients in each cohort, respectively, 62.5% and 67.6% expressed a desire to reduce their medication burden, and 85.6% and 95.8% were willing to stop one or more medications if recommended by their hospital physician. There were no significant associations between patients' attitudes towards deprescribing and patient age, number of medications, educational level, history of falls, appetite, nutritional status or biomarker-based proxies of disease burden. These findings suggest that deprescribing interventions may be broadly acceptable by patients across different healthcare settings but should be guided by personalised, patient-centred approaches.