[Pharmacists' Behavior in Clinical Practice: Results from a Questionnaire Survey of Pharmacy Students]

A questionnaire survey was performed to obtain pharmacy students' impressions of pharmacists' behavior, to classify these based on professionalism, and to analyze the relationship between these experiences and students' satisfaction with their clinical practice in Japan. The questionnaire was answered by 327 5th-year pharmacy school students upon completing clinical practice at community pharmacies from 2011 to 2012. They rated their satisfaction with their clinical practice using a 6-point Likert scale, and provided descriptions of their experience such as, "This health provider is professional", or "What a great person he/she is as a health provider". We counted the words and then categorized the responses into 10 traits, as defined by the American Pharmaceutical Association Academy of Students of Pharmacy-American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, Council of Deans Task Force on Professionalism 1999, using text mining. We analyzed the relationship between their experiences with respectful persons, and satisfaction, using the Mann-Whitney U-test (significance level<0.05). Most students (337 of 364, 92.6%) reported experiences with respectful health providers. These students experienced significantly more satisfaction than did other students (p<0.001). We analyzed 343 sentences written by 261 students, using text mining analysis after excluding unsuitable responses. The word most used was "patient" (121 times). Many students noted their impression that the pharmacists had answered patients' questions. Of the 10 trait categories, "professional knowledge and skills" was mentioned most often (151 students).