Surveillance study on the needs for self-medication of local residents and community pharmacists in Fukuyama

Abstract

In recent years, self-medication is promoted to control the health care cost of aged people in Japan. On the other hand, there are many pharmacists who are perplexed in diversification of work with promotion of self-medication be- cause of shortage of information, including the knowledge of an over-the-counter drug, health food, etc. It is therefore needed to design an efficient education program for pharmacists, especially in aging society such as Fukuyama. In this study, we investigated the needs for self-medication of local residents and community pharmacists in order to clarify the high-priority education themes for promotion of self-medication in Fukuyama. The pharmacist's needs were extracted by the KJ method and prioritized by the two-dimensional developed leaf method, and the local resident's needs were ex- tracted by questionnaire survey from 420 general populations who live in Fukuyama. As a result, we found that the com- munity pharmacists were especially in need of acquisition of the knowledge about "health food" and "food", and the local residents were especially in need of consultation with community pharmacists about "medicine", "side effect of medicine", "health food" and "food". Moreover, we also found that sixty percent of local residents did not have knowledge about interaction of "medicine" and "health food" while the half of them was taking in "health food". From the above result, knowledge improvement of "health food", "food" and "interaction of medicine and health food" in addition to "medicine" and "side effect of medicine" is the high-priority education themes for local residents and community pharmacists to promote self-medication in Fukuyama. © 2011 The Pharmaceutical Society of Japan.