Patient Perspectives on Provision of Drug Information Services in Japan

Abstract

Today pharmacists provide indispensable drug information to patients, however, few studies have examined the kind of information that patients want, or their satisfaction with pharmacists' advice. Therefore, we have examined a variety of factors, including individual patient characteristics, in order to identify ways to provide useful and appropriate drug information on an individual basis. In short, the aim of this study was to develop a drug information service that addresses patient needs. A prospective survey of patient satisfaction with the level of care provided by pharmacists, before and after a telephone counseling session, was performed over a 9 month period (2000-2001). Along with satisfaction ratings, the content of the interviews was assessed, along with patient characteristics. Correspondence analysis was used to classify the content of the consultations, and cluster analysis was performed to classify caller characteristics. In total, 2022 people were counseled. It should be noted that, on occasion, family members were interviewed instead of the patients themselves. The average counseling session was 11.5 minutes (n = 1876). Patients expressing the least dissatisfaction prior to counseling tended to have the highest satisfaction levels after counseling. Almost all patients were satisfied with the counseling they received. An association was found between levels of pre-counseling dissatisfaction and time spent counseling patients over the telephone. No dimensions of high inertia were identified by correspondence analysis of consultation content and patient characteristics (n = 1667), however, questions regarding "efficacy and indications", "dosages and administration", "anxiety of adverse events", "realization of adverse events", and "interactions" were deemed similar by correspondence analysis. This study shows that patient perceptions regarding drug information services differ from those of pharmacists. Furthermore, several subtypes of patients were identified, based on their responsiveness to counseling. Pharmacists should take this into consideration when standing face-to-face with patients in the setting of their pharmacy practice.

Drug information for patients—an update of long‐term results: type of enquiries and patient characteristics

“…36 Therefore, drug information centres can be useful as a valuable source of information. 37 Adverse drug reactions are common reasons for contacting a drug information service, 31,32,38 which was also observed in our evaluation of the DISP, and are of particular relevance for patient safety. Adverse drug reactions are responsible for an increasing number of hospital admissions in recent years.…”

“…29 Reports on drug information services in other countries showed a gender distribution comparable to our findings. 30,31,32 As expected, patients contacting the service more than once were older, had to take more drugs or were suffering from more diseases, which increased the number of medication-related questions. On average, men asked about significantly more drugs per enquiry than women, correlating with a larger number of drugs taken.…”

Status of Provision of Drug Information to Hypertensive Patients at Community-based Pharmacies

“…The Bungyo ratio(number of legal prescriptions as a percentage of the total number of prescriptions) obtained the following findings. Although previous studies reported similar results,12,13 settings of these studies were large hospitals or single centers.Our study revealed the current status of patientsʼ satisfaction and understanding of drug information in the primary care setting.First, most patients were shown to be satisfied with the current provision of information regarding antihypertensive drugs. However, problems were seen in their understanding of the information provided.…”