[Clinical Preparations: Status Quo and Challenges in the Future]

Dispensing clinical preparations requires the professional ability of pharmacists as specialists who understand the physicochemical properties of drugs. Clinical preparations contribute to the support of drug therapy and to commercialization by pharmaceutical companies. The Japanese Society of Hospital Pharmacists published the Guidelines on Hospital Preparations and Use in 2012. Those guidelines were designed to improve the safety and utility of hospital preparations, indicate the standard procedures for treatment in hospitals, and show how to ensure the quality of hospital preparations. The expiration dates for clinical preparations should be determined, although this is not done for most because of the numerous hospitals and differences in their approaches to quality control. Furthermore, the acquisition of informed consent for the use of clinical preparations is inadequate. After the guidelines were released, some problems have occurred, such as the underfilling of prescriptions for progesterone vaginal suppositories and overdoses of selenium injections. It therefore appears necessary to consider the development of a new procedural manual on clinical preparations. In this symposium, I discuss relief or safety measures for clinical preparations.