癌化学療法に関わる薬剤師の役割-質の高い情報提供の試み-

抄録

Generally, patients receiving chemotherapy for the first time are anxious that strong adverse reactions may occur because they have heard that anticancer agents cause stronger adverse reactions than other drugs. For this reason, it is important to provide them with quality information to alleviate their concern. It is common practice for physicians to inform patients about chemotherapy verbally, and to evaluate their satisfaction with this method, we gave a questionnaire to 52 patients undergoing chemotherapy. Among 45 of these patients, we found that 20% (9/45) had not understood the explanation of chemotherapy given by their physician and that 22% (10/45) were not satisfied with the information they had been given on adverse reactions. Ninety-three percent of them (42/45) said that they would prefer to have explanatory leaflets on chemotherapy.
In consideration of these findings, we prepared a leaflet on chemotherapy and during the period January 2003 through June 2004, we asked 44 patients to evaluate it. We found that 100% of the patients understood the information on chemotherapy in the leaflet and 95% (42/44) were satisfied with the information on adverse reactions. These findings suggest that leaflets prepared by clinical pharmacists can improve patients' understanding of chemotherapy and alleviate their concern about adverse reactions.