PREAVOID is pharmaceutical intervention that is utilized to illustrate pharmacists’ contributions to medical care.  Currently, there is a great need for pharmacists to provide good medical services to inpatients; as a result, many pharmacists conduct pharmaceutical management in hospital wards.  However, pharmacists who have limited experience in working in the ward do not know exactly what they should check with respect to pharmaceutical management.  To resolve this problem, we determined 16 pharmaceutical-management items based on PREAVOID that was conducted at Nagara Medical Center.  Moreover, we conducted a pre-questionnaire survey assessing whether pharmacists who had worked in the ward for fewer than 4 years attended to these 16 check items in their daily work prior to our introducing the list to them.  The results indicated that pharmacists who had fewer than 2 years of experience working in wards attended to the 16 check items less than those who had more than 2 years of experience, and approximately half of the pharmacists had not received adequate guidance before beginning work at the ward.  In addition, most pharmacists indicated that clear check points were useful for conducting pharmaceutical management and the 16 check items were useful for their daily work.  These results indicate that the 16 check items are a useful educational tool for enabling pharmacists to conduct high quality pharmaceutical management from the initial stage and that using the 16 check items is superior to pharmacists only gaining this ability via prolonged experience working in the ward.

Objective: Among the opioids used for treating dyspnea in cancer patients, the evidence for clinical use of fentanyl is not adequate. We report a case that suggested that fentanyl citrate patch improved dyspnea caused by lung metastasis of ureteral cancer.Case: An 86-year-old female was scheduled to start opioids for dyspnea caused by exacerbation of lung metastasis from ureteral cancer. Morphine hydrochloride was not chosen due to renal dysfunction, and oxycodone hydrochloride extended-release tablet was initiated. However, one day after starting medication, the patient refused to take the tablet because of vomiting. Given the difficulties in using morphine hydrochloride and oxycodone hydrochloride extended-release tablet, fentanyl citrate patch 0.5 mg/day was started for the purpose of improving dyspnea. The dose was eventually increased to 1.0 mg/day. Dyspnea improved and she was discharged.Conclusion: This case suggested the possibility that use of fentanyl citrate patch may be effective for dyspnea. Fentanyl citrate patch may provide one option when other drugs such as morphine hydrochloride and oxycodone hydrochloride cannot be used. However, since this is a report of a single case, further verification is required to clarify the effectiveness of fentanyl citrate patch for dyspnea.