A Study about “YARIGAI” : What Makes Work Worth Doing for the Community Pharmacists Who Participated in a Workshop of the COMPASS Project / 社会薬学

ABSTRACT

Objective: By extracting and modeling the component factors that community pharmacists have for “YARIGAI”—a Japanese colloquial expression commonly defined as “something worthwhile doing”—and by re-defining “YARIGAI,” we sought to help improve the quality of work lives of community pharmacists. Methods: All of 139 employee pharmacists participated in a workshop of the COMPASS Project (May 2011) were surveyed using a self-administered questionnaire. Responses were collected on the scene. The seventeen, 6-point-scale questions focused on the “patient-pharmacist relationship,” which may be related to “YARIGAI.” Then “YARIGAI” factors were extracted using factor analysis, and modeled using covariance structure analysis. IBM SPSS (ver. 20) and Amos 5.0J were used for the analyses. Results: To the item “I feel ‘YARIGAI’ with pharmacy work,” 12.2% of the 139 respondents said, “Strongly agree”, followed by “Agree” (41.0%) and “Somewhat agree” (33.8%). A factor analysis extracted three factors related to “YARIGAI” (knowledge, patient counseling management, and sense of personal growth). After modeling (AGFI 0.903, RMSEA 0.048) with these factors as latent variables and items in them as observable variables, a positive correlation was indicated for all the following factor pairs “knowledge” and “patient counseling management”, “knowledge” and “sense of personal growth”, and “sense of personal growth” and “patient counseling management” (standardized points of estimate 0.71, 0.55, and 0.42, respectively). Standardized coefficients for all latent and observable variables were 0.7 or higher, showing a good fit. Conclusion: “YARIGAI” of pharmacists employed by community pharmacies can consist of “knowledge,” “patient counseling management,” and “sense of personal growth”. Our results suggest that the improvement of communication skills and knowledge can lead to improvement of “YARIGAI” of pharmacists working for community pharmacies.