Generic names or trade names? prescibing practices of junior doctors

To ascertain the prescription patterns of junior doctors with relevance to the use of trade names and generic names and to assess their ability to identify and link trade names with their generic equivalents. Setting: The in-patient records of a large general hospital in Kuwait. A total of 100 randomly picked in-patient prescription records were analyzed for the use of trade or generic names. Ten prescribing junior-grade physicians were given questionnaires to assess their abilities to both identify a drug name as either trade or generic and to link the trade names with their generic equivalents. Atotal of 86% of the prescriptions were written by their trade names. From among the common drugs used, junior doctors correctly identified 94% as either the trade or generic name. The junior doctors were able to write the generic names for only 47% of the trade names listed. This study indicates that junior doctors use trade names in their prescriptions as a matter of habit and they were unable to link the trade names to their generic equivalents. Hence, a policy of using generic names only is suggested to improve prescribing habits