Noncompliance with Prescription-Writing Guidelines in an Outpatient Department of a Tertiary Care Hospital: A Prospective, Observational Study

Background There is lack of a systematic approach for reporting medication errors in Indian hospitals. The audit data will be of great value to health administrators drugs manufacturers and distributors and health professionalsrsquo groups for making informed decisions and drafting policies.Objective This study was conducted to evaluate and describe the quantitative type of prescription pattern as per the core prescribing indicators proposed by WHO and identify the commonly used drugs and detect any misuse to enable us provide recommendations for future use.Materials and Methods This prospective study was conducted for six months at an outpatient pharmacy of a multispecialty tertiary care hospital in Bengaluru.Results A total of 2840 drugs were identified in prescriptions of 1000 patients. Two drugs were common in most of the prescriptions 25.6. Fixed-dose combinations contained 784 27.63 of total drugs and two or more fixed-dose combinations were present in 168 16.8 prescriptions. A total of 51 drug interactions comprising 38 major interactions and 13 moderate interactions were noted in all prescriptions. Drugs from the National Essential Drugs List NEDL were 86.4 and 7.8 of the prescriptions contained high-risk medications.Conclusions The quality of written prescriptions was pitiful in terms of completeness. There is a need for improving prescription writing with regard to generic names of drugs legibility of the prescription and providing details of the prescriber and patient.Keywords Noncomplaince Prescription Audit Drug interactions