Evaluation of the Usefulness of a Completely Separated Infection Waiting Room and Non-infection Waiting Room in a Pediatric Neighborhood Pharmacy

Abstract

Because patients and their families are at a high risk of contracting infectious diseases in hospital as well as pharmacy, a pharmacy containing the waiting rooms separately for infectious diseases and non-infectious diseases is expected to lead them to visit with confidence and receive appropriate drug administration guidance without the risk of infection. In this study, we examined the potential usefulness of having separate waiting rooms by conducting a questionnaire survey on the structure of the pharmacy waiting room and investigating the visiting situation for influenza-infected pediatric patients from a record of the medicines they received. As a result of the questionnaire tabulated from guardians of 385 pediatric patients who first visited a pharmacy with separate waiting rooms, 70％ of the pediatric patients concluded that having separate waiting rooms would be satisfactory. In addition, the possible risk of horizontal transmission of influenza was supposed to be reduced in the pharmacy with separate waiting room in comparison with the pharmacies without among 211 pediatric patients who could not identify the influenza source within their daily living areas, such as home and school. Based on these findings, we anticipate the growing availability of the pharmacies having separation type waiting rooms.