POS (Problem Oriented System) is recognized as a useful concept in clinical practice. In November 2000, we established the Kyushu POS Pharmaceutical Society to support pharmaceutical care in the Kyushu area.
Initially, we sent out questionnaires regarding the POS to pharmacists in 66 hospitals. As a result, 33 % of the pharmacists reported that they were successfully using POS for pharmaceutical care at these 66 hospitals. Although each pharmacist drew up their own original manuals and checklists using POS, a need for common tools to standardize pharmaceutical care was indicated.
Therefore we designed two kinds of check sheets to both identify adverse reactions to antianxiety agents, antipsychotic agents and antidepressants, and to estimate the ADL (activity of daily living) of inpatients. We distributed our check sheets to the pharmacists belonging to our society at our meeting and these were put into practical use for psychotic inpatients at each of the hospitals.
For example, our check sheet for fluvoxamine was found to be useful in the treatment of a female patient with serotonin syndrome.
Four months after distributing our check sheets, we sent out another questionnaire to evaluate the usefulness of these sheets to 45 pharmacists belonging to our society. The results showed that most pharmacists had favorable comments indicating the sheets to be useful, by reducing the consultation time and improving the standardization of pharmaceutical care for psychotic inpatients. It was noted, however, that the instructions for POS and our check sheets were still insufficient. We therefore intend to further improve our check sheets to make them more useful in the future.
