Policies and interventions in the health-care system may have a wide range of effects on multiple patient outcomes and operate through many clinical processes. This presents a challenge for their evaluation, especially when the effect on any one patient is small. In this essay, we explore the nature of the health-care system and discuss how the empirical evidence produced within it relates to t...

The move from paper to electronic prescribing (EP) and medicine administration systems has long been advocated. Initial studies in the adult setting showed a significant reduction in medication errors. However, there are additional challenges to overcome to tailor these systems to paediatrics. Building on the basic elements of EP with the development of customised paediatric clinical decision s...

objectives: limited studies have demonstrated that the theory of  planned behavior (tpb) may be able to help in explaining the variation in physicians’ behavior. we selected the management of asthma as the tracer topic because asthma had nationally known clinical guidelines, and the main medicinal therapies used for asthma had limited applications for the treatment of  other diseases, and hence...

introduction: drug use in pediatric patients is a unique dilemma in the management and monitoring of disease. this study aimed at assessing medication prescribing in a pediatric ward of an  ethiopian hospital. materials and methods: a retrospective cross-sectional study was done by reviewing the medical records of 249 patients among those admitted in the period between 11th of september 2007 an...

background rational prescription is a considerable issue which must be paid more attention to assess the behavior of prescribers. the aim of this study was to examine factors affecting family physicians’ drug prescribing.   methods we carried out a retrospective cross-sectional study in khuzestan province, iran in 2011. nine hundred eighty-six prescriptions of 421 family physicians (including 3...

Rational prescribing increases the quality of health care and patient outcomes. In this study, the quality of drug prescription in specialist physicians in Isfahan province of Iran was assessed for evaluating the rational use of drugs and improving the therapeutic outcomes.This retrospective survey was conducted on a total of 7999530 prescriptions from all general and specialist physicians. The...

Implementation of electronic prescribing system can overcome many problems of the paper prescribing system, and provide numerous opportunities of more effective and advantageous prescribing. Successful implementation of such a system requires complete and deep understanding of work content, human force, and workflow of paper prescribing. The current study was designed in order to model the curr...

BACKGROUND Antimicrobial resistance has emerged in recent years as a significant public health threat, which requires both an ethical and a scientific approach. In a recent Policy Delphi study, on-farm use of antimicrobials was a key concern identified by veterinary professionals in Ireland. In this case study (the second in a series of three resulting from a research workshop exploring the cha...

abstract background: in most countries, one of the main reasons for developing more advanced roles for nurses is to improve access to care in the context of limited number of doctors. it is considered that the introduction of major policy initiatives, such as nurse prescribing, requires high-level discussion and policy development to ensure successful implementation. this study aimed to identif...

background: in-depth knowledge of antibiotic principles is widely considered a necessary condition for appropriate prescribing of antibiotics. the study aimed at determining the impact of healthcare providers’ level of knowledge in bacteriology and principles of antibiotic prescribing on their abilities to prescribe antibiotics appropriately. methods: a structured questionnaire survey targeting...