Objective: This study aims to clarify the current attitude status of community pharmacists toward pharmacies and the roles of family pharmacists.Methods: A questionnaire survey was administered to 196 community pharmacists involved in 52 community pharmacies.Results: Overall, 189 pharmacists responded to the survey. More than 80% of the pharmacists responded to “Pharmacists supervise all the medicines for patients, even if they were prescribed from various medical institutions, and check the acceptability of taking medicines together to prevent duplicate medications and drug interactions,” and 91.5% responded to “The pharmacy is close to medical institutions and convenient” as the reason for selecting a specific pharmacy. In terms of the reasons for patients to select a couple of pharmacies, 95.8% of the pharmacists responded to “The pharmacies are close to hospitals and clinics respectively, and convenient.”Relatively high percentages of the pharmacists responded to the following four roles of a family pharmacists: “A family pharmacist explains medicines to the patients in a way they can easily understand” (62.4%), “A family pharmacist provides consultations for medicines” (79.4%), “A family pharmacist exactly understands all the medicines the patients take” (62.4%), and “A family pharmacist checks duplicate medications and drug interactions prescribed in various medical institutions” (78.8%). However, only 15.3% of the pharmacists responded to “A family pharmacist shares information with prescribing doctors and medical institutions enough.”Conclusion: Although community pharmacists were conscious of several interpersonal activities, they believed that patients did not select a pharmacy on the basis of the qualities of the pharmacist but rather on the location of the pharmacy. Community pharmacists are facing challenges to become a true family pharmacist meeting the requirements of “Pharmacy Vision” and need to further improve their attitudes to play an important role in regional comprehensive healthcare with other medical professionals and institutions.

To promote the stockpiling of regular medicines for disasters (SMD), we investigated SMD rates and clarified the relationship between SMD status (Yes or No) and the characteristics of patients with chronic diseases. A survey was provided to patients visiting the pharmacies in Hokkaido. SMD was defined as a patient having a supply of regular medicine for 7 days or more and replacing with new medicine within one year. Of a total of 537 participants (51.0% male; mean age 65.8 years), 61.1% had experienced a major disaster. The SMD rate was extremely low at 15.3%. The median score for a patient’s understanding of the regular medicine names (5-point scale: 1＝hardly understood, 5＝almost understood) was 2. The median number of monthly pharmacy visits was 0.8. 5.4% were recommended SMD by physicians or pharmacists. Results from multiple logistic regression analysis indicated that positive patient characteristics included age (OR＝1.154, 95%CI [1.026-1.298], P＝0.017), understanding of the regular medicine names (1.724, [1.039-2.859], P＝0.035), and recommendation of SMD by physicians or pharmacists (5.991, [2.616-13.722], P<0.001). A negative patient characteristic was the number of pharmacy visits (0.587, [0.383-0.899], P＝0.014). The most influential positive factor was the recommendation of SMD by physicians or pharmacists; however, only 5.4% of the participants had experienced this. The findings of this study indicated important that health care providers and the government to work together to devise easy-to-understand measures to inform local residents about the importance of SMD and how to them, conduct educational activities.