Background: Tablets are the most common form of medication due to the simplicity and relatively cheap price in manufacturing them and also due to the easy administration method. Not all drug substances are available in all necessary dosage strengths, which forces the recipient of the drug to split their tablets. Tablet splitting is a commonly used method to obtain the proper dosage of drugs who don’t have the right dosage in the form of one tablet. The method is in theory simple, in that breaking the tablet in half should give half the dosage and so on, but it’s not always certain that splitting a tablet will give evenly divided parts, which in turn could lead to complications if the patient would receive too much or too little of the active substance. Purpose: The purpose of this report was to find out if patients had difficulties with splitting their tablets, if their tablets usually were evenly divided and if they ever experienced changes in the effect of their medication after splitting. To find out about all of this, patients from various pharmacies all over Sweden were interviewed and the answers of all patients were summarized in various tables for further examination and conclusion. Results: 171 patients were interviewed under a course of 2 weeks from 8 different pharmacies. Out of these, the majority of patients that required split tablets were between 66-75 years old and the majority of these were women. The drug that was split most often was Imovane® and in total, 71 % of the participants didn’t experience any problems with splitting the tablets while 20 % did experience problems. Conclusion: The results of this study show that while tablet splitting happens relatively often and several patients are prescribed drugs that require splitting even though the correct dosage is available in one tablet, there are relatively few patients that have problems with splitting, compared to the ones that did,. In addition, most patients  didn’t get any problems with their treatment after dividing. Granted, this is a small study compared to the whole Swedish population that split their pills and further studies are necessary in order to get a more concrete idea regarding how patients feel about splitting their pills.

Bakgrund: Enligt tidigare studier delas ungefär 10 % av alla läkemedel i tablettform enligt ordination från läkaren. Många som använder läkemedel är äldre och upplever tablettdelningen som ett problem. Delningsmetoden, tablettens egenskaper och utformning kan påverka hur bra resultatet av delningen blir. Syftet med denna studien var att ta reda på hur kunden gör när läkemedlet behöver delas och om information om tablettdelningen eller om alternativ till att dela på tabletten har tagits upp. Metod: Enkätintervju med apotekskunder som hade ordinerats tabletter som behövde delas. Resultat: Totalt intervjuades 171 apotekskunder. 153 av dessa hade olika metoder att dela på tabletten. För övriga 18 kunder hade läkemedlet blivit nyinsatt eller så användes tabletten hel. Slutsats: De flesta delade tabletten genom att bryta av den, dela med kniv eller använda tablettdelare. Drygt 78 % hade fått information om att tabletten skulle delas men väldigt sällan hade något alternativ till att behöva dela tabletten tagits upp. I drygt 50 % av fallen fanns läkemedel i den styrka som kunden var ordinerad.