TITLE:
Prescribing Pattern of Analgesic Drugs at Boru Meda Hospital, North East, Amhara, Ethiopia
AUTHORS:
Abebaw Tegegne, Wondesen Gashaw, Dawit Kidane
KEYWORDS:
Analgesics, Boru Meda Hospital, Opioids, NSAIDS
JOURNAL NAME:
Pain Studies and Treatment,
Vol.5 No.4,
October
30,
2017
ABSTRACT: Introduction: Pain is the sensory and emotional experience, which altered
human health and well-being. When pain does not resolve, it may be associated
with a serious disease, condition, or injury that needs timely medical
care and also irrational prescribing of analgesics, which is possible to lead to
unwanted side effects. Therefore, this study has been intended to evaluate the
prescribing pattern of analgesics drugs at Boru Meda Hospital. Method: A retrospective
cross sectional descriptive study was conducted. A total of 200
prescriptions containing analgesic were systematically collected by using well
designed and pretested Data collection format. The necessary information was
extracted from the prescription sheets by trained pharmacists and later analyzed
using SPSS version 20 software. Result: Regarding prescribed analgesic
acetaminophen 115 (36.9%) was the most prescribed, and then followed diclofenac
83 (26.6%) and Ibuprofen 64 (20.5%). The maximum number of analgesic
drugs was administered to patients by oral rout (75%), which is followed
by parenteral (19%). About dosing approach 94% acetaminophen prescribed as
needed (PRN) based, whereas ibuprofen 59.4% and tramadol 40% were prescribed
as twice a day (bid) based. Acute fibril illness (13.6%) was the highest
reason for prescribing analgesics. Conclusion: Majority of the prescription
analgesics drugs were prescribed as PRN dosing approaches with a very large
percentage of oral medications. Some of the prescriptions revealed irrational
prescribing of analgesics, in accordance of clinical indication, frequency of administration
and combination of analgesic.