Evaluation of Analgesic Usage in Pain Management in Bingham University Teaching Hospital

Inappropriate analgesic prescriptions is associated with poor management of pain leading to low recovery, high morbidity, increase hospital stay, decrease patient satisfaction, high costs of admission and adverse drug reactions. Therefore, the aim of this study is to assess the analgesic usage by the medical prescribers at the inpatient and outpatient clinic of a teaching hospital. The study was a descriptive cross-sectional analgesic utilization study, the age, sex, the drugs prescribed per patient were recorded and analgesic prescriptions were analyzed by Pearson test and statistical significance was determined at P<0.05. A total of 2920 prescriptions were analyzed, 88.9% of the patients were prescribed analgesics, 51.9% were males, majority of them were between 21 to 41 yrs (30.5%). Acetaminophen was the most prescribed analgesic (46.1%), the most prescribed analgesic combination was ketoprofen and ibuprofen (14.4%), 75.6% of the patients were placed on analgesic oral dosage forms and majority of these drugs were prescribed in generic names.