Browsing by Author "W/Gebriel, Fitsum"

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    Quality of Pediatric Prescription Writing at the Department of Pediatrics and Child Health Outpatient and Emergency Unit, Tikur Anbessa Specialized Hospital
    (Addis Ababa University, 2014-10) W/Gebriel, Fitsum; Shimelis, Damte(PhD)
    Introduction: Drugs are important components of health care and play crucial role in saving life. Drug prescription is the product of most medical consultations. Despite the importance of good quality prescriptions erroneous prescribing habits are not uncommon worldwide. Illegible or incorrect prescription can result in loss of the patient, physician and pharmacist time and may cause therapeutic error or drug toxicity. Hence the objective of this study was to assess the nature of prescription deficiencies (omission and error) in production of prescription with regard to Patient identification, drug information, prescriber’s identification. Methods: This was a prospective, cross- sectional hospital based study. All prescriptions issued to non admitted patients below 14 yrs of age visiting pediatric regular OPD, emergency and follow up clinics were collected from pediatric emergency and special clinic every day and assessed for their quality based on the nationally adopted format approved by Food Medicine and Healthcare Administration and Control Authority . Data was collected from May 1 to 31/2014 until the desired sample size is reached. Data was analyzed by SPSS for windows version 20. Results: Total number of prescription studied was 246. With regard to patient identification, 78% of prescriptions were lack patient age, 80.5% sex and 86.2% patient weight. 50.8% of the prescriptions were without drug formulation and 19.9% drug generic name. 30% of the prescriptions were issued with erroneous dose. Prescribers name was not documented in 45.5% of the prescriptions and date of prescriptions issued was not written in 65% of the prescriptions. Based on the predefined …. Conclusion and recommendation: From this study production of prescription quality is unsatisfactory as most of the prescriptions lack the essential elements. Patients are not well identified drug information is incomplete and prescribes identification is lacking in most of the prescriptions studied. And most of the prescriptions with poor quality are from clinics attended by senior residents. As a specialized teaching hospital the department should device corrective measure to enhance prescription quality, the hospital has to have prescription error reporting system and this calls for medication error study to evaluate the impact of prescription quality in the patient care. Key words: Prescription, Quality; Handwriting, physicians