In 2004 a program of community health and medicine was included in the national residency system. However, the contents and achievements of this program have not been adequately studied. We surveyed residents, program directors, and collaborating facilities for clinical training in community medicine in the Tohoku–Hokuriku region of Japan about the contents, practices, training period, curriculum development, and other aspects of the program.
1)We conducted a survey of 230 residents who had completed the program, 82 program managers, and 101 collaborating facilities.
2)The survey consisted of surveys of residents (survey 1), of program directors (survey 2), and of collaborating facilities (survey 3) and asked about the programs' consistency with the training objectives of the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and satisfaction with community medicine.
3)Approximately 70% of residents, program managers, and collaborating facilities believed the training period for community medicine is appropriate.
4)Furthermore, 69.1% of residents, 65.5% of program directors, and 85.2% of facilities believed that the community medicine program in the national system was important or very important.
5)Training programs should be enhanced so that residents "understand and practice health care in outlying and rural areas" and to increase active involvement of program directors.

Drug dispensing is a statutory and designated duty of a pharmacist. We aimed to examine the changes in the nature of drug dispensing using a text mining method. Our corpus consisted of text documents from “Chozai Shishin”, the most standard manual for dispensing drugs in Japan, Editions 1 to 13 (Japan Pharmaceutical Association), and we used the KH Coder software for text mining. We constructed networks showing the association between frequent word co-occurrence and edition number, and co-occurrence relations for frequent words in each edition. We found that “patient” superseded “dispensing” as a frequent term over time. “Dispensing” was another frequent term with a highly centralized node in each edition. Accordingly, we targeted the term “dispensing” for network analysis to depict its co-occurrence relations. We found that the range of related words for “dispensing” broadened from “preparation” and “compounding” to include “patient adherence instructions”, “assessment”, “medical treatment”, and “information provision”. Accordingly, we concluded that the content of “dispensing”, which is a pharmacist’s duty, has expanded from the duties of “dispensing drugs” to include “responding to patients” within the definition of “dispensing”, and we were able to present this finding as objective data by using the mechanical method known as text mining.

Drug dispensing is a statutory and designated duty of a pharmacist. We aimed to examine the changes in the nature of drug dispensing using a text mining method. Our corpus consisted of text documents from “Chozai Shishin”, the most standard manual for dispensing drugs in Japan, Editions 1 to 13 (Japan Pharmaceutical Association), and we used the KH Coder software for text mining. We constructed networks showing the association between frequent word co-occurrence and edition number, and co-occurrence relations for frequent words in each edition. We found that “patient” superseded “dispensing” as a frequent term over time. “Dispensing” was another frequent term with a highly centralized node in each edition. Accordingly, we targeted the term “dispensing” for network analysis to depict its co-occurrence relations. We found that the range of related words for “dispensing” broadened from “preparation” and “compounding” to include “patient adherence instructions”, “assessment”, “medical treatment”, and “information provision”. Accordingly, we concluded that the content of “dispensing”, which is a pharmacist’s duty, has expanded from the duties of “dispensing drugs” to include “responding to patients” within the definition of “dispensing”, and we were able to present this finding as objective data by using the mechanical method known as text mining.