Research
Drug Prescribing and Despensing Practice in Public Hospitals in Tigry Regional State, Ethiopia
Background: Rational use of drugs requires that patients receive medicines appropriate to their clinical needs, in doses that meet their individual requirements, for an adequate period of time, and at the lowest cost to them and the community. Irrational prescription of drugs is a common occurrence in clinical practice. The cost of such irrational drug use is enormous in terms of both wastage of scarce resources and the adverse clinical consequences of therapies that may have real risks but no objective benefits. Therefore, the aim of this study is to assess the drug prescription and dispensing practice of public hospitals in Tigray Region. Methods: a total of 768 prescriptions were reviewed retrospectively from outpatient departments of public hospitals from August 04 -21 2011. The selected hospitals include, one Referral, two zonal and two district hospitals and 384 patients/care takers were interviewed after they collect their drugs. Results: A total of 768 prescriptions were analyzed, average number of drugs per encounter were 1.77 which is in line with World health Organizations recommendation. Three hundred forty eight 45.3% prescriptions had antibiotics. Majority 72.4%, of the drugs were prescribed by generic name and 16% prescriptions had injections per encounter. Most of the drugs were prescribed from essential drug list 98.0%. However, only 11.7 were adequately labeled. Similarly, patient interview revealed that, only36.0% of patients has adequate knowledge regarding the prescribed drugs. More than half 56.9 % of patients don’t know for what disease the drug is prescribed. Most 83.9% of patients know how frequent they should take the drug but only 46.2% of the patients know the dose of the drug they supposed to take. Conclusion: The prescription pattern in terms of the number of drugs prescribed per prescription is good. Prescribing drugs by generic name, antibiotic and injection prescriptions, filling of prescriptions with the necessary information, and
