Using Microsoft Access 2000, we developed a pharmaceutical management and counseling support system that enables us to produce explanatory leaflets on medicines. However, a growing number of foreigners have been admitted to our hospital recently and most of them cannot read Chinese characters, though they can read the Japanese katakana and hiragana scripts, so they could not use our leaflets. To solve this problem, we improved the software so that the system would produce leaflets in English for them. We translated various items in leaflets into English such as the effects of medicines, initial symptoms of severe adverse events and changes in colors of stools and urine. We also asked eleven foreign patients to complete a questionnaire regarding the usefulness of the new explanatory leaflets, and they all thought the leaflets were useful.
At present, no similar software is available on the market and even if such software were available, it would be very expensive. Since we feel that our software is very useful, we have made it freely available at no cost.
