Investigation of Patients’ Mood on Their Distance from the Pharmacist during Medication Instruction

Background: Pharmacists must adjust their distance from patients to facilitate communication during interviews and gain their trust. The distance between the patients and the pharmacists varies depending on many factors, such as gender, posture and the patients’ mood. Only a few of these papers have actually measured and validated distance with patients. In this study, we validated our method of assessing mood and measuring distance before beginning a survey with patients. Methods: We measured comfortable interpersonal distance among men and women using an ecological scenario, in which a pharmacist approaches the subject, and the subject is asked to stop the pharmacist at the distance he/she feel comfortable with. Five pharmacists and 33 subjects participated in the study. The Japanese version of the Brief Mood Questionnaire Checklists (BMC-J) was used to quantify the subject’s mood for the day, and then the distance from the pharmacist that the subjects considered comfortable was measured at the bedside. The relationship between the mood and distance obtained was examined. Results: The comfortable distance of subjects was influenced by gender, posture, and mood. The shortest distance was 94.7 ± 11.1 cm (mean ± SD), for the male subjects versus the female pharmacists in the sitting position. The distance of male subjects shorted when they had positive emotions and lengthened when they were worried. Female subjects maintained a long distance from both male and female pharmacists when they had positive emotions and a short distance when they were worried. Conclusion: Findings show that the distance changes depending on the subjects’ mood at the time of measurement. It was found that the present measurement method can be used to determine the psychological state of the patient and measure the comfort distance at that time, and can be used as a simple method to examine these relationships. Therefore, it is also considered a practical method for the next step, which is a clinical study on patients.

Risk of alcohol use relapse after liver transplantation for alcoholic liver disease

AIM To investigate factors, including psychosocial factors, associated with alcoholic use relapse after liver transplantation(LT) for alcoholic liver disease(ALD).METHODS The clinical records of 102 patients with ALD who were referred to Nagoya University Hospital for LT between May 2003 and March 2015 were retrospectively evaluated. History of alcohol intake was obtained from their clinical records and scored according to the HighRisk Alcoholism Relapse scale, which includes duration of heavy drinking, types and amount of alcohol usuallyconsumed, and previous inpatient treatment history for alcoholism. All patients were assessed for eligibility for LT according to comprehensive criteria, including ChildPugh score, Model for End-Stage Liver Disease score, and psychosocial criteria. RESULTS Of the 102 patients with ALD referred for LT, seven(6.9%) underwent LT. One(14.3%) of these seven patients returned to heavy drinking, but that patient was able to successfully quit drinking following an immediate intervention, consisting of psychotherapeutic education and supportive psychotherapy, by a psychiatrist. A comparison between the transplantation/registration(T/R) group, consisting of the seven patients who underwent LT and 10 patients listed for deceased donor LT, and 50 patients who did not undergo LT and were not listed for deceased donor LT(non-T/R group), showed statistically significant differences in duration of abstinence period(P < 0.01), duration of heavy drinking(P < 0.05), adherence to medical treatment(P < 0.01), and declaration of abstinence(P < 0.05).CONCLUSION Patients with ALD referred for LT require comprehensive evaluation, including evaluation of psychosocial criteria, to prevent alcoholic recidivism.