The effect of community pharmacist on outpatient chemotherapy

<p>Many of cancer chemotherapy are performed in an outpatient department today. In order to observe the state of the patients and symptoms while chemotherapy is conducted, we post pharmacists in the outpatient chemotherapy room, providing education to patients, as well as giving suggestions to doctors regarding prescription. In this study, we reviewed pharmacists' suggestions to doctors and investigated the change of side effects of the patients. We studied 84 patients who received cancer chemotherapy as outpatients from July 2011 to June 2013 with side-effect Grade I and over at the point we provided the suggestion. Then, we compared the side-effect Grade before and after the suggestion. As the symptoms to evaluate we chose nausea, vomiting, anorexia, stomatitis, diarrhea, condition of skin and nails, constipation, peripheral neuropathy, which were reported in the form of self-check list by the patients each time they received chemotherapy. During the term of investigation, we interviewed 335 patients, resulting in 3,902 times in total. In the same period, we gave 342 suggestions to the doctors, and 88.0% of the suggestions were accepted. Among the suggestions, 52.0% were related to side effect, 17.0% treatment contents, 13.5% complication, 8.8% pain, 5.3% examination, 2.0% administration day changes, and 1.5% drug interaction, respectively. Out of 84 patients, 51% made improvement in terms of Grade, and symptoms elimination was observed in 38%. These results suggest that placement of pharmacists in an outpatient chemotherapy room is helpful to observe directly the change of the patients' condition. Furthermore, it enables for the pharmacists to make appropriate and urgent suggestions from the pharmaceutical point of view.</p>