Impression Change and Its Factors among Outpatients with Cancer due to Continuous Consultation by Pharmacists

Patients' impressions of pharmacists at the time of consultations are important for building a relationship of trust between the cancer patient and the pharmacist. In this survey conducted using an adjective-pair questionnaire, we investigated changes in patients' impressions about pharmacists and associated factors because of continuous consultations with pharmacists. The subjects were outpatients with cancer at the Tsushima City Hospital who received their first cancer chemotherapy regimen from August 2018 to August 2020. Board Certified Pharmacist in Oncology Pharmacy consulted with the subjects at each treatment, and the subjects' impressions about these pharmacists were investigated using the questionnaire twice, during the first and the fifth treatment sessions. The survey was aimed at evaluating adjective-pairs on a 7-tier scale. The data obtained from the patients' medical records were date of birth, gender, cancer type and stage, regimen, and adverse events and their responses. We also calculated the predicted 5-year survival rate and analyzed the changes in each adjective-pairs for each patient attribute. As a result of 14 people, after 5 times each in 3-4 months, the score related to the sense of stability changed significantly to a negative impression as a whole. However, when changes in impressions were compared using the patient attributes of age, gender, predicted 5-year survival rate, and whether or not the patient complained of adverse events, the impressions of female patients and patients who complained of adverse events were found to tend toward a change to "pleasant" (p = 0.031 and p = 0.027, respectively). We found no significant changes in the cancer patients' impressions about pharmacists after five pharmacist consultation sessions. However, patient gender and adverse events were the factors that affected the patients' impressions. Overall, our findings suggest that sufficient consideration should be given to building a relationship of trust between cancer patients and oncology pharmacists.