A STUDY ON ASSESSMENT OF PRESCRIBING PRACTICES IN EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT OF A TERITARY CARE TEACHING HOSPITAL

Background: In the emergency department, doctors face urgent and severe cases that need to be treated quickly with high quality. Therefore, clinicians often face challenges in selecting, initiating and individualizing appropriate drug therapy for patients admitted in the emergency medicine ward. Objective: To assess the prescribing patterns of drugs and to determine the rationality of prescriptions by using World Health Organization prescribing indicators. Materials and Methods: A prospective cross sectional study was carried out in emergency department for six months. About 520 case sheets were reviewed. Data were collected using structural data entry form and analyzed. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the data. Results: The data was collected prospectively and analyzed using WHO prescribing indicators. The average number of drugs prescribed was 6.40 per prescription. The drugs prescribed by generic name accounts for 20.9% and those prescribed from EDL include 83.88%. At least one antibiotic was prescribed for patients which is high (57.31%). Most of drugs were administered through injection for about 49.24%.Patients were mainly admitted for nausea and vomiting (16.92%). Anti-emetics were the mostly prescribed therapeutic class of drugs for patients (24.75%). Haemoglobin (98.65%) was the most common investigation performed in the study population. The commonly used fixed drug combination was piperacillin and tazobactum (3.75%). Conclusion: Analysis of case records for drug utilization pattern revealed that most of the drug classes were prescribed for appropriate indication. Prescription of multivitamins appears largely irrational. The results indicate a considerable scope for improving the prescribing pattern of drugs in the emergency department.