Community health education led by faculty pharmacists and pharmacy students: A pilot study of feasibility and effects on health-seeking attitudes and self-medication literacy.

Background

Community pharmacist utilisation in Japan remains low despite the Health Support Pharmacy (HSP) framework: approximately 7.6% of residents have a regular pharmacist and only 8.6% are aware of the HSP framework. In this context, connecting residents with pharmacists is worthwhile, and community health education can make pharmacists more visible and approachable. The Health Café program pursues this while also serving as an experiential-learning model, positioning faculty pharmacists as content providers and pharmacy students as dialogue facilitators.

Objective

To assess the feasibility of the Health Café model and its effects on residents' consultation sources, health-seeking attitudes, and self-medication literacy.

Methods

Feasibility (participation, questionnaire completion, as-planned conduct) was summarized descriptively. Two sessions with independent samples used single-arm pre-post designs (N = 49 and N = 22), analysed at the participant level. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Teikyo Heisei University (No. 2025-080).

Findings

Feasibility was demonstrated: enough residents participated (49 and 22), questionnaire completion was near-complete (100% and 95.5%), and it was held as planned without problems. In the first, pharmacist selection rose from 2.0% to 40.8% (p < 0.001). In the second, the largest improvement was in anxiety about health and medicines (p = 0.070); this and the other four - self-care, pharmacist-consultation decisions, trust in the pharmacist, and intention to consult one - were non-significant (all p > 0.05). IMPLICATIONS The Health Café proved feasible and promising for its three aims - connecting residents with pharmacists, making them visible and approachable, and an experiential-learning model. A larger controlled study with student-outcome measures is warranted.