Migraine is accompanied by severe pain, photophobia, nausea, and vomiting, placing a heavy burden on daily life. However, many patients and consumers with migraine have do not seek medical attention and use over-the-counter drugs at their own discretion. Easy, repeated use of antipyretic analgesics can lead to headaches due to overuse. In recent years, new acute care has been adopted and prophylactic drugs have been administered as prescription drugs. The prophylactic drug dimetotiazine has also been proposed as an over-the-counter drug. As the number of headache treatment options is increasing, the follow-up of patients, including the interictal period, is important. However, there are few cases where pharmacists are consulted. This paper outlines the roles required of pharmacists in the treatment of headaches, such as support for self-medication and self-care, and medical cooperation.

In recent years, patients have been encouraged to use their family pharmacy for prescriptions rather than a pharmacy near the hospital. Therefore, community pharmacists receive more prescriptions for a large number of diseases. Pharmacists are required to follow up on a patient’s condition after they have received their medication. As a result, the need for information on outpatients by community pharmacists is increasing. The purpose of this survey was to investigate the content of outpatient information required by community pharmacists and the means of sharing this information. A total of 68.6% of community pharmacists considered the sharing of outpatient information to be beneficial. Community pharmacists regarded information on patients, such as “disease name” and “current medical condition”, to be the most useful, while other information on prescriptions, including “reason for prescription change” and “prescription intent”, was also listed as useful. Community pharmacists wanted to continue using paper forms, such as prescriptions, for information sharing. Information on outpatients is expected to be shared in the future, and if information on outpatients that community pharmacists consider to be useful is shared, the contribution of community pharmacists to the drug treatment of outpatients will increase.

Allaying parents’ concerns about their children’s medication use is one of the most important issues for pharmacy pharmacists；but few reports currently available have focused on children’s birth order. In this study, we surveyed parents of pediatric patients who visited 13 of our insurance pharmacies in Tokyo between December 2021 and January 2022 about issues that cause anxiety when their infants take pediatric medications. Among the 269 valid responses studied. The parental response rate for infants (under 1 year old) was highest for “side effects”, “allergies”, and “strength of medicine” in the firstborn group with the same value, followed by “side effects”, “something to mix medicine”, and “nothing” in the second and later children group. The parental response rates for toddlers (aged 1 to 6 years) were “something to mix medicine”, “side effects”, and “strength of medicine” for the firstborn group, and “nothing”, “taste and smell”, and “something to mix medicine” for the second and later children group, in that order. Therefore, it is suggested that parents’ concerns about their children’s medication differed according to the children’s birth order, and it is possible that parents’ parenting experience may have an influence on this trend.

When patients who use our Sukoyaka pharmacy, which is community collaboration pharmacy, as primary care pharmacy receive cancer treatment, they will have the opportunity to choose between continuing to use our pharmacy or switching to a specialized medical institution cooperation pharmacy with an oncology pharmacy specialist. Thus, we conducted a questionnaire survey to identify the needs and psychographic characteristics to the oncology pharmacy specialist of visitors.

The questionnaire survey enrolled 65 visitors who received anticancer drug treatment at Sukoyaka pharmacy between January 2020 and February 2021, and the results were analyzed.

A substantially high number of patients preferred the enrollment of a pharmacy specialists in this pharmacy rather than selecting other pharmacies with oncology pharmacy specialists. The psychographic characteristics of visitors with a strong intention to select pharmacies with oncology pharmacy specialists included willingness to consult with a pharmacy pharmacist, ability to collect information from websites, and unique awareness of anticancer drugs. The psychographic characteristics of visitors with a strong intention to enroll oncology pharmacy specialists in this pharmacy included reassurance, willingness to consult with hospital pharmacists, and receptivity to information sharing.

The Okayama Pharmaceutical Association has developed its own Preavoid reporting system, specifically Pharma-PROs, to collect Preavoid cases. In this study, we conducted a questionnaire survey to examine the factors associated with Preavoid reporting and to evaluate the utility of Pharma-PROs in promoting Preavoid reporting. We found a significant association between the implementation of Preavoid reporting and pharmacist experience and being a pharmacist belonging to a corporation consisting of more than 20 facilities. The results of the study suggest that Pharma-PROs can reduce the burden associated with Preavoid reporting and enhance comprehension and the quality of advance reporting. These findings imply that this project provides valuable support for Preavoid reporting.

In contrast, inexperienced pharmacists and pharmacists in relatively small pharmacies were relatively less likely to report Preavoid. The reasons for this and the support needed requires further investigation.

We surveyed the status of the number of pharmacists and the need for additional pharmacists by 2025 and calculated the sufficiency rate of pharmacists in pharmacies and the expected sufficiency rate of pharmacists in pharmacies in 2025 according to the number of working pharmacists. We then examined the sufficiency of the pharmacist work content and the need for an increase in the number of pharmacists by 2025 and how the use of information and communications technology (ICT) and dispensing assistants would affect pharmacist workloads. The results showed that pharmacies with only one pharmacist have a low shortage of pharmacists and that the shortage of pharmacists is expected to become even more serious, and that the satisfaction of patient-centered services other than filling prescriptions regardless of the number of pharmacists, and that the usage of ICT and dispensing assistants has the effect of promoting pharmacists’ patient-centered services. In particular, the need for more pharmacists in patient-centered services other than prescription receipt increased in pharmacies with one-person pharmacies, and the use of dispensing assistants had a similar effect in pharmacies with two pharmacists. The results suggest that the use of ICT and dispensing assistants will promote a shift to interpersonal services in small pharmacies if the necessary supply of pharmacists is secured in the future.