Effects of patient-pharmacist communication in the treatment of asthma.

We studied the relationship between patient-pharmacist communication and asthma treatment, including patient understanding of drug therapy, ability to self-treat with inhaled drugs, and control over asthma. The study was among adult patients who had received inhaled steroidal or other drugs from community pharmacies in Hokkaido, Ibaragi, Tochigi, Kanagawa, and Osaka prefectures for at least one year. During the month of November 2007, pharmacists explained the study to patients and obtain consent before distributing questionnaires to be filled out and mailed back.

An analysis of job search behaviour of inactive nurses in Japan.

Aim: The aim of this paper is to examine inactive nurses' job-searching behaviours to return to healthcare workplace at where serious difficulty of meeting demand and supply of nurses exist.

Design And Methods: To clarify the factors that would make their attempts easy or difficult, successful or not, we employed econometric method to analyse the probability of job finding in terms of both the length of duration and the quality of consequence in job-seeking behaviour by using microdata pooled on Japan Nursing Association Computer System (NCCS), in which inactive nurses' individual attributes (gender, age, academic background, the types of qualifications, the number of preschool aged children, etc) are stated.

Results: From the estimations, we found that (i) having preschool children is one of the factors of delaying job finding, and failing to obtain desired workplace and working style; (ii) nurses with higher educational backgrounds tend to spend a longer time in finding jobs and (iii) training programme for the returners may not work well in case of shorter career blank, while may support for those who have longer one.