OBJECTIVES: Hypertension has few subjective symptoms and its treatment must be continued long term, as patients may stop visiting the hospital regularly and give up on lifestyle improvements. Therefore, the effective and brief coaching-style intervention program is essential in community pharmacies.  The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of intervention by community pharmacists on the awareness of continuing treatment among patients with hypertension. METHODS: This study was designed as a cluster-randomized controlled trial with a 3-month intervention period. The subjects comprised adult patients with essential hypertension who had been taking antihypertensive medication for at least 3 months. Patients in the intervention group underwent a motivational interview with a pharmacist lasting around 3 minutes each time they received a prescription, while those in the observation group were provided with usual care. Both groups’ patients were provided with a home blood pressure monitoring device and pedometer.  The study outcome was awareness of the continuation of regular hospital visits, healthy diet, and appropriate exercise, rated on a 10-point scale from “Extremely important” to “Not at all important.” RESULTS: Responses were obtained from 114 patients at 55 pharmacies (intervention group: 28, observation group: 27). that had enrolled in the study  A comparison of awareness before and after intervention showed that only awareness of regular hospital visits had improved in the observation group (p = 0.03), whereas in the intervention group, awareness of both regular hospital visits (p = 0.04) and appropriate exercise (p = 0.02) showed improvement. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this study revealed that intervention by community pharmacists may contribute to raising awareness of the need to continue exercise.  This result implies that pharmacist can improve patients’ ability to chronic disease management.