Zahid Mahmood, Muhammad Hanif Mengal, Sheraz Saleem, Haroon-ur Rashid, Safirah Maheen.
Irrational Drug Use; Evaluation Of Prescribing Trends In A Hospital.
Professional Med J Jan ;24(10):1489-94.

Objectives: To evaluate drug prescribing practices at Medical Unit, ICU and Nephrology Unit, using WHO prescribing indicators, in order to promote rational drug use. Study Design: A retrospective cross sectional study. Place and Duration of Study: Bolan Medical Complex Hospital Quetta, Pakistan, from July to December 2015. Methodology: Drug prescribing trends in 218 prescriptions were scrutinized thoroughly. Data was collected by well-trained pharmacy personals by using prescriptions and prescription registration books of patients. Descriptive statistics were calculated on SPSS version 16.0. Results: The average number of drugs prescribed per prescription were 4.11 whereas, WHO recommends that it should be 2.00 or less. Alternatively, percentage of drugs prescribed by generic name and from an essential drug list were 14.73% and 78.35% while, in accordance with WHO it must be 100% and 70% correspondingly. On the other hand, percentage of encounters having antibiotics or injections prescribed were 18.33% and 32.79% but according to WHO it should be20% or less and 10%respectively. Nevertheless, proper diagnosis was stated in 89.44% of prescriptions and 72.11% prescriptions had complete relevance between treatment and diagnosis. Along with, appropriate drug dosage and their administration was instituted in 65.16% of prescriptions and 73.21% of prescriptions had accurate duration of therapy. Conclusion: The prescribing patterns in Bolan Medical Complex Hospital Quetta reflect the practice of polypharmacy, which is more of an irrational type in contrast to WHO recommendations. Thus, there is an urge to bring about some interventions to improve the pharmacotherapy

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