In 2012, the external prescription rate was 66.1% of the national average. A dispensing doctor is recognized by the escape clauses of Article 22 of the Medical Law, Article 21 of the Dentist Medical Law, and Article 19 of the Pharmacists Act. In this study, the medicine inventories of dispensing doctors and pharmacies were compared. The medicine supplies of 7 dispensing doctors and 11 pharmacies in Saitama were classified according to the medicinal effects. We also investigated the conditions in which high-risk medicines, poisons, or drugs were stored. The average number of medicines in the medicine inventory of a dispensing doctor was 262.3 (range : 99, 439), whereas the average number of medicines in the medicine inventory of a pharmacy was 1179.7 (minimum, 275 ; maximum, 1980). Further, among these medicines, there were an average of 41.0 high-risk medicines (minimum, 18 ; maximum, 76) in the inventory of a dispensing doctor and an average of 176.7 high-risk medicines (minimum, 5 ; maximum, 299) in the inventory of a pharmacy. In addition, poisons (average, 0.3) and narcotics (average, 0.9) were found to be stored by dispensing doctors. The study results revealed that pharmacies as well as dispensing doctors stored high-risk medicines. The dispensing doctor may be indirectly associated with critical medical accidents to need cross-check by pharmacist exceedingly high-risk medicine. Thus, for patients to use medicines appropriately and for them to be reassured of the safety of medicines, only professionals such as pharmacists, rather than doctors, should dispense medicines.

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 We found that “patient” superseded “dispensing” as a frequent term over time.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.