Objective: The care of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has a significant impact on the life of caregivers.  Some of the major daily tasks for caregivers are the administering and management of patients’ medications.  The aims of the present study were to evaluate the current state of administering and management of medications by caregivers, and the usefulness of medicated patches for improving compliance.
Methods: We sent questionnaires to 62 caregivers of AD patients, and 60 responses were analyzed (response rate: 96.8%).
Results: We found that approximately half of caregivers had some difficulties with administering and managing medications.  A total of 80% of caregivers took less than 3 min to administer and manage medications.  Approximately half of caregivers responded that patches were useful, but 15% stated that current medications were not the cause of difficulties.  These respondents were concerned that patches may result in adverse skin reactions.
Conclusions: The results of this survey indicate that caregivers do not have difficulties with administering and managing medications, and further concern is needed about the usefulness of medicated patches.

The narcotics and psychotropic drug control laws were recently revised to enable the transfer of narcotics between narcotic retailers. However, there has been no study on the effect of this change to the law.For this reason, we studied whether there are any problems to this change in the law.We sent questionnaires to pharmacists at 3000 community pharmacies as a representative national sample, and 1036 responses were analyzed (response rate: 34.5%). Only 20.2% of pharmacists in community pharmacies answered that it is easy to obtain or transfer narcotics by applying for permission to transfer narcotics between narcotic retailers. The majority of pharmacists found the process to be difficult. The reasons for this included the complicated application procedure required by the regional bureau of health and welfare, and problems with the control of the prescribed narcotic's distribution as it is possible to apply only once for the supply of prescribed narcotics for the same patient. Furthermore, pharmacists cannot obtain the narcotics from a stock pharmacy. These results suggest that the current system of requiring permission for transfer of narcotics between narcotic retailers is inefficient and inadequate for maintaining a sufficient supply of narcotics for controlling the pain in cancer patients living in certain areas and overly complicates the procedure of obtaining narcotics by community pharmacies. It is important that the control of narcotics in Japan is changed to more closely resemble that of other commonly available prescription drugs, and allow narcotics to be obtained from stock pharmacies. Palliat Care Res 2010; 5(2): 213-218

Introduction: Number of palliative care team increase every year, but the quality of team might differ from each other. We developed “Self-Check Program for Palliative Care Team” to assess and improve the quality of palliative care team. We report the result of the multi-center study to assess the feasibility of this program. Methods: We underwent the “Self-Check Program” as a trial at seven hospitals in Japan in February 2016. We took a questionnaire survey to team leaders and participants to assess the feasibility of this program. Results: Fifty-two medical staffs in six hospitals accomplished this program. Time scheduling and the integration of opinions from each team members were the difficulties came up from questionnaire survey. All team leaders and 87.8% of the participants answered that this program was effective to extract and improve the problem of the team. Also 83.3% of the team leaders were satisfied with the process of planning. Conclusion: Despite some difficulties, majority of the participants considering useful, this program is considered feasible.