Background: Drug utilization study is an important tool to study the clinical use of drugs and its impact on healthcare system. There is limited data from Indian medical intensive care unit (MICUs) on prescription patterns.
Objectives: To study the drug utilization pattern in the patients admitted to the MICU.
Materials and Methods: A retrospective observational study was conducted in a 14 bedded MICU of rural tertiary care hospital. Indoor case papers of the patients admitted to the MICU between 1st January 2016 and 28th February 2016 were studied, and the prescribing pattern was analyzed using the World Health Organization (WHO) basic drug indicators.
Results: A total 234 cases with the mean age group of 48 years were evaluated, 141 (60.78%) of which were males and 93 (39.74%) were females. The most common cause of admission was suicidal poisoning (45.69%). The average duration of stay was 4.24 days. The average number of drugs prescribed per patient was 6.26. Pantoprazole, atropine, pralidoxime, ondansetron, and ceftriaxone were prescribed in more than 30% of the patients. Average antibiotic prescribed per patient was 1.12 and ceftriaxone (30.42%) was the most commonly prescribed antibiotic. 47.97% of prescribed drugs were from the WHO model list of essential medicines and 60.48% were according to their brand names.
Conclusion: The findings of this study are comparable to those of other studies. However, there is a scope of improvement in areas such as overdosing, prescribing more by generic names instead of brand names and from WHO Model List of Essential Medicines.
Key words: Drug Utilization; Defined Daily Dose; Prescribed Daily Dose; Overdosing; Generic Drugs; Essential Medicines
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