Toxicological Services in Emergency Medical Care, Screening for Drug Abuse and Blood Alcohol Measurement-Student Training Strategy for "Contribution to Poisoning Treatment" in the Model Core Curriculum for Clinical Pharmacy Training-

The key to the success of the six-year pharmacy education program in Japan is to adhere to the model core curriculum for clinical pharmacy training in hospitals and community pharmacies.To ensure the steady implementation of the model core curriculum for training in hospitals,hospital pharmacists have to provide students with 10 classes in pharmacy services,consisting of dispensing of medicines,dispensing of injections,aseptic preparation of anti-cancer agents and total parenteral nutrition,inventory control,pharmaceutical management and counseling services,drug information,drug formulation,risk management,therapeutic drug monitoring and pharmacy services for poisoning treatment.However,many hospitals cannot handle some of these practices.One of them is“contribution to poisoning treatment”the most difficult pharmacy service in the core curriculum to provide students with practice in,in the large majority of hospitals.Our pharmacy department in Asahikawa Medical College Hospital provides screening for drug abuse (available 24 hours a day) and blood alcohol measurement as toxicological services in emergency medical care.In the drug abuse screening service,we use a Triage®DOA,a commercial kit with which it is very easy to carry out screening even in small hospitals.It takes only 15-20 min to do this.As a“contribution to poisoning treatment”,training in these pharmacy services will be provided in the student curriculum in pharmacy practices in our pharmacy department.In this paper,we describe the toxicological services we provide and our strategy for training students in them.