病院薬剤師に対する後発医薬品の使用状況に関する調査とその解析

Abstract

In recent years, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) has actively promoted the use of generic drugs (GD) in order to reduce patients' drug costs and make more effective use of medical resources. We conducted a questionnaire survey on the use of GD by non-national hospital pharmacists in the Kinki region's six prefectures.In the responses, 80.9 % of hospital pharmacists considered that patients were paying more than before for their medicines and most felt that reconsidering the drugs used for prescriptions was a good way of reducing patient costs. Pharmacists who thought that GD would reduce medical expenses accounted for 69.2%. Those who actively dispensed GD replied that they did so because this aided hospital cost management and helped reduce patients' medical expenses. As the conditions for the use of GD in hospitals, most pharmacists gave “reliable supply”, “adequate product information” and “same quality as the original drugs”. However, 82.8% of the hospitals surveyed had an adoption rate of under 10% for GD.A major conclusion drawn from the survey was that GD were not fully used in non-national hospitals. In contrast, they are dispensed much more often in national hospitals where they are used on the basis of the standard check-list distributed by the MHLW, which has been providing this checklist and other GD information through its web net system since April 2004. We consider that the MHLW' s GD information should be made much more widely available.