Drug utilization study in the department of psychiatry

Abstract

Psychiatry disorders are creating its own place in morbidity these days. Various factors like cost of drugs, local paradigms, etc, plays a critical role for selecting the appropriate therapy for a particular patient because usually they are chronic therapy. Keeping this in mind, we conducted a study to delineate the various drugs used in psychiatric disorders, to find discrepancies. Drug utilization studies are essential for correct use of drug. Our study identifies the problems that arise from drug usage in health care delivery system and highlights the current approaches to the rational use of drugs. A total of 518 patients’ data were collected during the period and analyzed for WHO recommended prescribing and complementary indicators. Study shows low incidence of poly pharmacy which is good as poly pharmacy is common in psychiatry and also use of injections was very low. Study shows that prescribing from WHO List of Essential Medicine was not as good as it accounted for only 21.3%. There is scope for improvement in case of medicines prescribed by generic name as none were prescribed by generic name. The average cost per prescription in our study was only 9.41 Indian rupees per day which is affordable by the majority of the patients.

Drug Utilization Evaluation of Antidepressant Prescribing Practice in a Psychiatric Outpatient Hospital: A Prospective Cross-Sectional Study

“…It is observed that polytherapy over monotherapy was predominantly common with three drugs per prescription being most frequent and a maximum of eight drugs was also seen as reported in previous studies [14,[26][27][28][29]. This is further revealed and supported by the WHO core prescribing indicator that the average number of drugs per prescription was 3.4.…”