BACKGROUND Most health expenditure of developing countries is on drugs and medical sundries but inappropriate use of such resources is common. To our knowledge, only few studies have been done in Africa on this issue , with inadequate consideration of the sociological context of the knowledge, attitude and practice of the prescribers especially doctors. This study presents the pooled data of th...

Introduction A major challenge to the provision of health care worldwide is the irrational use of antibiotics. To help promote rational use of drugs, standard treatment guidelines (STG) and essential medicine lists and facility-specific formularies have been developed to be used by clinicians. This study assessed the prescription pattern of antibiotics and explored the use of STG by clinicians....

Background: This study was aimed to evaluate the orthopedists’ prescription pattern for outpatients referred to private clinics in Kerman province, Iran. Methods: In this study a total of 59,613 outpatients’ prescriptions issued by orthopedists contracting with Iran Health insurance organization and Iran Social Security Organization from the 1st May...

Objectives: Psychotropic drug use in the elderly with chronic schizophrenia is an important issue in the field of psychiatry. The main goal of this study was to clarify the pattern of such drug use in these patients, in order to consider such therapy plan and focus on its cost attributing measures, for a more reasonable quality of care program. Methods: In this descriptive study, participant...

Introduction: Irrational drug prescription is a controversial issue around the world that inter-feres not only with the patient's life but also with the society and economy. Despite few studies, there is no enough data on the prescription ha‌bits of dental practitioners. So, we aimed at eva‌luating the same issue in Rasht, Iran. Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional re-trospective study r...

This study compared the interrater agreement for pattern differentiation and acupoints prescription between two groups of human patients simulated with different diagnostic outcomes. Patients were simulated using a dataset about zangfu patterns and separated into groups (n = 30 each) according to the diagnostic outcome determined by a computational model. A questionnaire with 90 patients was de...

OBJECTIVES To determine (i) the prevalence and pattern of prescription errors in our Centre and, (ii) appraise pharmacists' intervention and correction of identified prescription errors. DESIGN A descriptive, single blinded cross-sectional study. SETTING Kidney Care Centre is a public Specialist hospital. The monthly patient load averages 60 General Out-patient cases and 17.4 in-patients. ...