Evaluation of Clinical Pharmacy Services Database Created for Inpatients Receiving Chemotherapy for Hematologic Malignancy

In recent years,remarkable progress has been made in cancer chemotherapy.Pharmacists play an important role in ensuring the safety and effectiveness of chemotherapy by checking chemotherapy regimens,monitoring patients after treatment and providing information on chemotherapy to other medical staff and patients but at busy times it can be difficult to perform all of these tasks due to lack of time and manpower.To speed up the management of cancer chemotherapy and enable us to conduct it more easily,we created a database using Microsoft Access which uses three main categories of data,that relating to patient backgrounds,drugs and regimens.The system is equipped with a function for retrieving and modifying such data and it has enabled us to easily prepare explanatory leaflets containing dose schedules and precautions in treatment.It also facilitates the creation of several types of worksheet for checking prescriptions and monitoring patients for respective regimens.We next evaluated the usefulness of our database and also conducted a questionnaire survey targeting patients and nurses on the explanatory leaflets produced using it.For almost all chemotherapy regimens,the creation of the database enabled us to check prescriptions and provide information on them in advance.Further,all of the respondents to the questionnaire replied that the leaflets produced would be useful in helping patients to understand their therapy better.From the results of this study,we consider that our database would be an effective tool in pharmaceutical management for cancer chemotherapy.