Evaluation on Clinical Pharmacy Services by Nurses

Abstract

We have impression that the insurance reimbursement program for handling in-patient care services prepared by hospital phamacists in Japan has been established as an important routine work. Accordingly, we felt the need to understand clearly the nurses' requirements regarding clinical pharmacy services offered in Hirosaki University Hospital. We therefore made a survey to assess the nurses' idea for clinical pharmacy services in our hospital because we recognized that they should be smoothly introduced in our hospital. Of 363 questionnairs distributed to nurses in Hirosaki University, usable responses of 90.0% were returned. Although almost all nurses (94.4%) were unaware of the insurance reimbursement program system prepared by hospital pharmacists in Japan, nearly all of them (98.5%) recognized the necessity of providing medicational instruction concerning drug therapy. Almost all nurses (78.0%) thought that the clinical pharmacy services offered by pharmacists were needed for effective clinical drug therapy whereas 22.0% of them responded that they were unnecessary. About half nurses in our hospital had expectation or uneasiness about the clinical pharmacy services offered by pharmacists.