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clinmed/2002050004v1 (May 16, 2002)
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Prescribing patterns in medical outpatients
Ravi P Shankar, Praveen Partha, and Nagesh Shenoy
Summary:
A drug utilisation review was carried out in the medical out-patient department of the Manipal teaching hospital, a tertiary care hospital in Pokhara, western Nepal to determine the prescribing frequency of commonly used drugs. An attempt was made to relate prescription data to age and sex of the patients. 530 prescriptions were analysed and the mean ± SD drugs per prescription was 2.15 ± 1.71. 67.4% of the drugs were prescribed by brand names and only 39.56% of the drugs prescribed were from the WHO essential drug list. The average cost of drugs per prescription was 2.75 ± 2.21 US dollars. The frequency of prescribing of antiulcer drugs, antibiotics, antiasthma drugs, antihypertensives and analgesics were 24.15% (n=128), 23.96% (n=127), 20.56% (n=109), 19.81% (n=105) and 15.09% (n=80) respectively. This study reveals a lot of scope for educating the prescribers to improve prescribing practices.
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- Ravi P Shankar
- ClinMed NetPrints, 27 Jan 2003
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