Quality of Prescription Writing Practices in a Tertiary Care Teaching Hospital of Bihar: A Cross-Sectional Study

Quality of Prescription Audit

Abstract

Introduction- Prescription is an important order which is given by the doctor to their patients. For the maximum benefit of the patients the prescription order should be according to the predefined pattern. Prescribing errors are very common in clinical practice, which may cause harm to the patient rather than benefit. To reduce the prescription error and promote rational prescribing, continuous monitoring of prescription in the form of prescription audit is required.

 Objective- To audit the prescriptions from different OPD (Out Patient Department) in a Tertiary care teaching hospital, Patna, for its legibility and completeness.

Methodology-It is descriptive cross-sectional study conducted in Out Patients Department of Tertiary care teaching hospital, Patna from 10th June 2019 to 20th July 2019. In this study Non probability purposive sampling to ensure maximum variability.

 Results- In this maximum number of prescriptions collected from Medicine department (21.5%). The average number of drugs prescribed per prescription is 3. Drugs were prescribed by their generic name in only 10% of prescriptions. Frequency, route and duration of administration of drug were mention in 86.7%, 79.3% and 69.6% of prescriptions respectively. Out of total prescriptions only 42.5% prescription were easily legible.

 Conclusion- In this study we found that most of the prescription parameters were not according to the WHO standard, which can cause harm to the patients rather than benefit.

 Recommendation - For quality improvement of prescriptions there is need to train the doctors to write prescription according to the guidelines and also time to time monitoring by hospital authority.