This study aimed to evaluate drug utilization in pediatric out-patient department of a tertiary care teaching hospital. The patient and drug information of 254 patients was analyzed for WHO recommended prescribing indicators. The average number of drugs per prescription was 2.31 and 45% of medicines were prescribed from National List of Essential Medicines. The use of injectibles was low (1.18%...

Inappropriate prescribing reduces the quality of medical care and leads to a waste of resources. To address these problems, a variety of educational and administrative approaches to improve prescribing have been tried. This article reviews the experiences of the last decade in order to identify which interventions have proven effective in developing countries, and suggests a range of policy opt...

I t is commonly thought that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates the use of all pharmaceutical drugs in the United States. In fact, most hospital patients are given drugs that are not FDA-approved for the prescribed use. The FDA does require that drugs undergo extensive testing before they are released onto the market and, if it concludes that a new drug is unsafe or not effec...

Drug therapy is the most commonly used method of any disease treatment in general practice. However, the patterns of drug prescription are often inappropriate and the need for registration and evaluation of these patterns is essential in an effort to improve prescription standards. Cross sectional retrospective study was used. Prescriptions were selected by using simple random sampling techniqu...

o bjectives: cases of antimicrobial resistance are increasing, partly due to inappropriate prescribing practices by dentists. the purpose of this study was to investigate the prescrib- ing practices and knowledge of dentists with regards to antibiotics. moreover, this study aimed to determine whether the prescriptions comply with the recommended guidelines and whether clinical audit can alter t...

OBJECTIVE to meta-analyze studies that have assessed the medication errors rate in pediatric patients during prescribing, dispensing, and drug administration. SOURCES searches were performed in the PubMed, Cochrane Library, and Trip databases, selecting articles published in English from 2001 to 2010. SUMMARY OF THE FINDINGS a total of 25 original studies that met inclusion criteria were se...

BACKGROUND Drug formularies have been created by third party payers to control prescription drug usage and manage costs. Physicians try to provide the best care for their patients. This research examines family physicians' attitudes regarding prescription reimbursement criteria, prescribing and advocacy for patients experiencing reimbursement barriers. METHODS Focus groups were used to collec...

OBJECTIVE To compare the experiences of e-prescribing users and nonusers regarding prescription safety and workload and to assess the use of information from two e-prescribing standards (for medication history and formulary and benefit information), as they are implemented. DESIGN Cross-sectional survey of physicians who either had installed or were awaiting installation of one of two commercia...