Survey on Perceptions of Home Care Physicians and Nurses Regarding Home Medical Care and Expectations to Pharmacists / 社会薬学

ABSTRACT

Objective: We search valuable information in home medical care settings that impede smooth collaboration among pharmacists, home care physicians, and home care nurses. Methods: We conducted an online survey on 120 physicians and 118 nurses on “areas perceived as overloaded with tasks,” “quality of life (QOL) evaluation of patients,” and “expectations to pharmacists.” We analyzed data using the Mann-Whitney U test and conducted the customer satisfaction (CS) analysis on “stress.” Results: Physicians answered that they had a significantly higher stress on “at night-time/holidays and weekends works” than nurses (p < 0.05). Nurses experienced significantly more stress during “inter-professional collaboration” than physicians (p < 0.01). CS analysis revealed that nurses experienced more stress for items such as “having patients with dementia self-inject correctly,” etc. Both physicians and nurses evaluated QOL items at a high frequency. Majority of physicians and nurses held high “expectations to pharmacists,” particularly for the eight items related to providing information, managing drugs, and making pharmacological judgments. Nurses had significantly high expectations to pharmacists for “management of supplements taken by the patient” (p < 0.01), “explaining drug effects” (p < 0.001), and “explaining the necessity of prescription revision” (p < 0.01). Discussion: Pharmacists should utilize information on physicians and nurses’ stress as well as understand their expectations to pharmacists to facilitate stronger coordination between both professions and contribute to patient care. In particular, many items were found to cause stress, indicating that support for nurses, who have many expectations to pharmacists, needs to be enhanced.