Introduction: Kitasato University Hospital offers a training course for community pharmacists that focus on advanced pharmacy management care in outpatient cancer chemotherapy. The objective of this training program is to facilitate the transition from general to oncology certification for community pharmacists with limited experience in outpatient oncology to support the acquisition of an oncology specialty.
Aim: To evaluate the relationship between the changes in awareness, knowledge, and self-assessment that advanced pharmacy management care traineeship in an outpatient oncology unit for community pharmacists brings to trainees and the duration of training.
Methods: A quantitative text analysis was conducted of the daily training reports of six community pharmacists who had participated previously in the training course and had received in-service training in oncology for at least 30 days. The pre- and post-training results of the knowledge tests and self-assessments of confidence, understanding, and performance were compared. This study was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of Kitasato Institute Hospital in October 2019 (Study No. 19044).
Results: The terms Prescription, Recommendation were extracted from the daily report after the 21st day of oncology in-service training. Furthermore, factors such as knowledge of cancer pharmacotherapy, confidence in patient education regarding the side effects of chemotherapy, and understanding of the work of pharmacists in outpatient cancer chemotherapy significantly increased at the end of the training.
Conclusions: Community pharmacists with limited experience in outpatient oncology could improve their knowledge, understanding, and awareness of outpatient oncology patient care through 30 days of in-service oncology training in a hospital setting. The issues that emerged included training pharmacists to send follow-up documents on the patients' side effects and medication status as well as developing the literature search environment in community pharmacies.
Keywords: Advanced pharmacy management care; community pharmacist; oncology specialist; traineeship; university hospital.