Evaluation of prescription pattern and drug dispensing from a pediatric outpatient department of a tertiary care hospital

The present study was planned with the aim of identifying scope of improvement in rational drug use in outpatient practice in the pediatrics in a growing medical college from western Uttar Pradesh. We audited 3202 individual drugs on 1186 prescriptions of Pediatrics OPD during Feb 2013-Jan 2014 using "Core drug use indicators" formulated by World Health Organization. A trained person conducted the interviews just after the parents came out of the OPD room. The data for the "prescribing indicators" was recorded by scrutinizing the prescription immediately after the patient-doctor interaction. 3202 individual drugs were prescribed on 1186 prescriptions during the study period. Average number of drugs per encounter was 2.8. Almost 70% of the prescriptions contained two or three drugs per prescription. Maximum number of drugs (7 and 8) were prescribed to only 4 (0.34%) patients. Prescriptions in trade names (88.12%) dominated prescriptions in generic names (11.88%). Most drugs (79.43%) were not adequately labeled as the name of the patient and the generic name of the drug were not written. Similarly, only 27.57% of the parents of children could tell us the correct dosage schedule for all the drugs prescribed.