Table 3.
Home Locations Where Adolescents’ Prescription Medications were Stored in Past 6 Months (n = 230 adolescents)*
| n (%) | Supervised Medications† | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| All‡ | Controlled§ | ||
| n | n | ||
| Kitchen cabinet/drawer | 75 (32.6%) | 10 | 3 |
| Bathroom medicine cabinet/drawer/countertop | 60 (26.1%) | 9 | 4 |
| Participant’s room | 33 (14.3%) | ||
| Open storage: Kitchen/dining room/living room countertop/table/desktop/basket/jar | 30 (13.0%) | 1 | 1 |
| Inhalers on person/in sport’s bag/sport’s locker | 23 (10.0%) | ||
| Relative keeps them on person or in their room | 21 (9.1%) | 17 | 7 |
| Respondent’s bathroom in cabinet/drawer/on countertop | 15 (6.5%) | ||
| In refrigerator | 5 (2.2%) | 1 | |
| Medicine cabinet in location other than kitchen/bathroom (hall, linen closet, computer room) | 3 (1.3%) | ||
| “Unsure where kept” | 1 (0.4%) | ||
| Not specified/recorded | 4 (1.7%) | ||
Percentages sum to greater than 100% since adolescents indicated more than one storage location.
In this study, the term “supervised” means that adolescents indicated during the semi-structured interviews that access to their prescription medications was supervised by an adult. Medications were recorded as “supervised” if respondents indicated that they were dispensed or laid out for adolescent self-administration by an adult.
This column is a subset of Column 1 and indicates locations of all medications categorized as “supervised.” In total, 38 of the 230 adolescents who had taken prescription medications in the previous 6 months were “supervised.”
This column is a subset of Column 2 and indicates the supervised medications which were classified in the prescription pain reliever, anti-anxiety, stimulant, or sedative category.