BACKGROUND Assessment of patterns of drug to detect performance problems and compliance with standards facilitates objective comparisons and impact evaluation. Children are at higher risk of consequences of irrational prescribing and antibiotic misuse. OBJECTIVE The objective of the study was to evaluate the prescribing pattern and utilization of antibiotics for children using standard prescr...

BACKGROUND Irrational prescribing and dispensing of antimalarials has been identified as a contributing factor in the emergence of malaria parasites resistant to existing antimalarial drugs. Factors that contribute to such irrational prescribing and dispensing should therefore be identified to address this problem. The aim of this study was to assess irrational antimalarial drug dispensing and ...

Drug utilization in the inpatient setting can provide a mechanism to assess drug prescribing trends, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of hospital formularies and examine subpopulations for which prescribing habits may be different. Such data can be used to correlate trends with time-dependent or seasonal changes in clinical event rates or the introduction of new pharmaceuticals. It is now pos...

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. Th...

OBJECTIVE To explore types of e-prescribing errors in community pharmacies and their potential consequences, as well as the factors that contribute to e-prescribing errors. METHODS Data collection involved performing 45 total hours of direct observations in five pharmacies. Follow-up interviews were conducted with 20 study participants. Transcripts from observations and interviews were subjec...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the cost savings that could result from implementation of a rational prescribing model for drug classes that are equivalent in terms of efficacy, toxicity, and convenience. DESIGN The top 10 drug classes based on annual spending were gathered from the Canadian Institute for Health Information. They were reviewed for potential inclusion in the study based on the ability t...

The aim of this study was to explore drug prescription habits using WHO standard indicators in public hospitals and 36 private surgeries in 2 provinces in South Africa. A high mean number of drugs were prescribed per patient (3.2 versus 2.8) in public hospitals and by general practitioners (GPs) respectively andc generic prescribing rates were low (45.2% versus 24.5%). The rates of prescribing ...

OBJECTIVE To study the characteristics of off-label prescribing and adverse drug reaction (ADR) occurrence in a sample of pediatric outpatients treated by general practitioners. METHODS A survey on pediatric drug prescribing was implemented in 46 general practices in southwestern France. All consecutive patients aged 0 to 16 years were included. Patient characteristics, reasons for consultati...