Drug Prescription in the Department of Medicine of a Tertiary Care Hospital according to the World Health Organization/International Network for Rational Use of Drugs Core Indicators: A Descriptive Cross-sectional Survey

Abstract

Introduction: To establish appropriate health care services in developing countries, rationalization of drug use holds utmost importance. Drug use patterns can be found out using Core Indicators of the World Health Organisation in collaboration with the International Network of Rational Use of Drugs. With the help of the indicators, this study aimed to find out the way the drugs were prescribed in the Medicine out-patient department of a tertiary care hospital.

Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional survey was conducted from October 2019 to March 2020 in a tertiary care hospital. The ethical approval was taken from the Institutional Review Committee of the Dhulikhel hospital (reference number 198/19). Convenient sampling was done. After taking consent from the patient, data was collected from prescriptions written on the patient's card. The data were analysed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences Version 25. Descriptive statistics were applied and the results were expressed as frequency and percentage, mean and standard deviation.

Results: A total of 559 prescriptions were analysed, of which a total of 1427 medicines were found to be prescribed with an average number of medicines per the prescription of 2.55±1.388. Drugs prescribed by generic name were 820 (57.5%), antibiotics were 138 (9.7%) and injections were 8 (0.6%). Drugs prescribed from the Essential Drug List of Nepal was 939 (65.8%).

Conclusions: Our study revealed that despite some results being up to the mark, there is a requisite for the proper regulation of prescribing and dispensing drugs in order to promote rationalisation.