Prescription Pattern and Prescription Errors: A Retrospective Study of In-patient’s Record at a Tertiary Care Hospital Peshawar, Pakistan

Abstract

In-appropriate prescription pattern and prescription errors arises health problems globally therefore, this piece of research study was designed to find out prescription pattern and prescription errors at Institute of Radiotherapy and Nuclear Medicine (IRNUM) Peshawar. A total of 400 in-patient’s prescriptions were evaluated including 64.5% (n=258) male and 35.5% (n=142) female patients. Most of the patients were children 38% (n=152) in the age group of 0-10 years. A total of 4226 drugs were prescribed and average number of drugs per prescription was 10.56 (n=4226), percentage of prescriptions with an injection (s) prescribed was 35.25% (n=1490), percentage of prescription with an antibiotic (s) prescribed was 30.28% (n=1280), percentage of drugs prescribed by generic names were 2.74% (n=116), number of drugs prescribed from the World Health Organization Essential Drug List (WHO EDL) was 5.20% (n=220) and National Essential Drug List (NEDL) was not found. A total of 1120 prescription errors were investigated including 33.03% (n=370) absence of strength of drugs, 39.46% (n=442) illegible hand writing prescription, 22.76% (n=255) have absence frequency of drugs, 4.73% (n=53) with improper abbreviations and 52.5% (n=400) drug-drug interactions were found. This study indicates that in-appropriate prescription practice is prevalent and need further study to improve rational drug usage.