Counseling of Patients with Bronchial Asthma, and Clinical Pharmacy Practice and Education of Pharmacy School Students

Abstract

In the present study, the authors established a system for counseling patients with bronchial asthma (BA) by hospital pharmacists in the hospital. During patient-counseling, hospital pharmacists give the medication-instructions to the patients, in order to improve both the pharmaceutical benefits of the drug and also their quality of life (QOL). On the other hand, in order to foster better pharmacists in future clinical settings, pharmacy school students in master' s and undergraduate courses should learn not only general pharmaceutical management and care of patients but also patient-counseling skills in a clinical pharmacy practice class.During clinical pharmacy practice in our hospital, patient-counseling has been established in conjunction with the clinical education of pharmacy school students, and was further evaluated through a questionnaire survey to BA patients and pharmacy school students. As a result, individual counseling with medication-instruction has contributed to the improvement of the patients' QOL by alleviating the anxiety associated with drug therapy. It was, however, shown that an undesirable gap in the recognition between the understanding of patients and doctors still exists in pharmacotherapy. Accordingly, BA patient-counseling by pharmacists might be necessary to eliminate such gaps in the understanding. On the other hand, from questionnaires of students and the patients, it was suggested that clinical education such as counseling in pharmacy schools should either be added or strengthened in the present pharmacy school curriculum.