Effect of Educational Activity to the Medical Staffs on a Useful Application of Therapeutic Drug Monitoring.

It has recently been reported that therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) plays an important role in the optimal individualization of drug dosage regimens. However, TDM is known to have some pitfalls including inappropriate blood sampling, and these pitfalls are considered to possibly result from a lack of TDM education by the medical staffs, especially doctors and nurses. In the present study, we thus tried to determine whether an improved knowledge about TDM by the medical staff would result in a better drug therapy (e.g. dosage design). The medical staff was thus taugth about TDM pharmacists regarding several points, including a blood sampling. After this TDM education, the incidence of a time difference between the enforcement time and the recording time of drug dripping and blood sampling significantly decreased. The incidence of inadequate blood sampling in outpatients was 90% before TDM education, while after such education, it was only 14.5%. TDM education improvements were observed in the dosage regimens, drug evaluation, and monitoring of side effect, drug interaction and compliance, and thus, effectiveness of drug therapy was a much higher, than that before TDM education. These results suggest that an improved educational program for TDM given by pharmacists for medical personnel may thus significantly improve the clinical effectiveness of drug therapy and also help to avoid errors drug administration.