Aim: To investigate the attitude toward polypharmacy among family doctors and pharmacists in Kanagawa prefecture.
Methods: A questionnaire survey was conducted to 2,448 medical facilities advocating internal medicine, surgery, or orthopedics, and to 2,415 pharmacies.
Results: More than 90% of both doctors and pharmacists understood the importance of polypharmacy and thought that 90% of doctors and pharmacies had been regularly coping with polypharmacy. However, although Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan’s guidelines are considered useful, the utilization rate was less than 7.2% for both. For the causes of polypharmacy, doctors or pharmacists answered that they were due to visits to multiple medical facilities (82.1%, 79.7%), having multiple symptoms (65.7%, 48.5%), and drugs requests from the patient (43.7%, 59.9%), which are related to patients’ conditions or attitudes. Pharmacists also answered that prescribing cascade (59.2%) and insufficient understanding of medication status (55.1%) which are related to doctors’ attitude were also related to incidence of polypharmacy. Most pharmacists wanted to reduce drugs, but only 47.3% answered that they had made a proposal for deprescribing to doctors.
Conclusions: Actions against polypharmacy are necessary in a super-aging society, and it is important to disseminate and utilize the relevant guidelines. The results described that proposal for changing drugs to doctors were still difficult for pharmacists, and that doctors and pharmacists should have better relationship to facilitate the process of checking adverse drug events, medication adherence of older patients.
