Influence of interventions on prescription writing practices in a tertiary care teaching hospital

ABSTRACT

Background: Prescription practices should be good so that they are correctly interpreted and medications are used or administered accordingly. Studies are found usually focusing on WHO prescribing indicators in various healthcare set-ups. This prescription audit study was conducted to analyse the prescription practices in a tertiary care hospital and see the influence of various interventions on these practices.Methods: It was a quality initiative undertaken to retrospectively assess and evaluate the change in the prescription writing practices in the in-patient department of a tertiary care teaching hospital from March 2017 to April 2018. Number of interventions were conducted to meet the compliance of prescription parameters during the study period and prescription parameters was analysed again thereafter for one-year to see the change.Results: An overall increase in compliance of prescription parameters was found from 67.3% in March 2017 to 94.8% in June 2017. Thereafter this was consistently maintained upto 91% during the study period. Most of the prescription parameters were seen to be improved like allergy history taking from 52.2-95.6%; mention of prescriber’s name, sign, registration number from 53.5-86%; consideration to food-drug interaction from 28.7-99.5%.Conclusions: Prescription writing practices were quite poor initially which improved after various interventions were carried out in the study area.