We conducted a prospective cohort study of 16 community and hospital pharmacists who attended the workshop. The workshop information was distributed via e-email to all pharmacies and hospitals belonging to the Mie Pharmaceutical Association in the period from November 5, 2024 to November 20, 2024.

The workshop was conducted on December 1, 2024. The timetable is shown in Supplementary Table 1. For the first 15 min, the lecture focused on the design of a pharmaceutical questionnaire. Second, the theme of group work was introduced. Third, the research topics were assigned to three groups (five to six members in each group, with a mentor) with the task of taking 90 min to construct a questionnaire relevant to the topic. (Supplementary Fig. 1). Lastly, a presentation session was conducted to discuss the pharmaceutical questionnaires for 60 min.

Questionnaires were collected using Google Forms (Google, Mountain View, CA, USA). Details of the questions are provided in Table 1. The outcome was set as the effectiveness of the present workshop on an increase in the participants’ awareness and motivation of questionnaire-based survey and was evaluated based on three questions. For questions on outcomes, the same responses were obtained before and after the workshop. While questionnaires before the workshop were collected at the time of registration, a second questionnaire survey was performed immediately after the workshop.

A customer satisfaction (CS) analysis was conducted to identify areas for improvement for the design of future workshops on questionnaire-based surveys in pharmaceutical practice. Details of the questionnaire used for the CS analysis are provided in Supplementary Table 2. Based on the CS analysis, Quadrant I was defined as items to be maintained in their current status, whereas Quadrant IV was identified as an item requiring improvement in future workshops. The CS analysis was performed using Microsoft Excel 2019 (Microsoft, Redmond, WA, USA).

Changes in the participants’ awareness of the design and use of questionnaire-based surveys in pharmaceutical practice were analyzed using McNemar’s test. All statistical analyses were performed using SPSS Statistics version 27 (IBM Japan, Tokyo, Japan), and the significance level was set at p < 0.05.