Prescription Practice and Its Error Patterns in Outdoor Departments of Selected Bangladeshi Tertiary Care Hospitals
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Abstract
Introduction: Prescription can be referred to as the main part of the health care system. Most of the patients in Bangladesh prefer tertiary care hospitals. So, we decided to assess the prescription pattern and prescription errors in different tertiary care hospitals in Bangladesh. Methods and materials: Prescriptions were collected from the outdoors of the general medicine department of three tertiary care hospitals. The prescription data were presented in frequency, mean, percentages etc. A Chi-square test was also performed and different crosstabs were presented to show the relationship between different variables. Results: Among the patients, 55.9% were female and 25.1% were male. Patients from the age group 25-40 were the most common (34.5%), and the child (0-14) patient percentage was low (1.2%). A total of 501 prescriptions contained 1717 drugs. The average number of drugs per prescription was 3.42. A trend of writing an excess number of medicines was noticed among the prescribers. Anti-ulcerants were the most frequently seen treatment category, where proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) contributed to almost 60% of cases. There were several prescription errors noted in the survey, such as avoiding generic prescribing (100%) and essential drugs, and omission of information related to diagnosis (100%), patients’ age (20.56%) and gender (18.97%).Conclusion: Prescription errors can lead to severe consequences, including adverse health outcomes and, in extreme cases, mortality. Addressing these errors through better regulations, healthcare provider training, and digital systems can significantly improve overall healthcare efficiency. Malaysian Journal of Medicine and Health Sciences
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