Prescription Pattern in the Eye Clinic of a Tertiary Health Facility in South-East Nigeria.

Abstract

Introduction: Eye care is imperative and requires that ophthalmic prescriptions be generated properly. Evaluation of prescription pattern is an aspect of investigation of drug utilization which is an essential part of pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacovigilance. Objectives: To determine the prescription pattern in the eye clinic of a health facility using the WHO core prescribing indicators and document the disease pattern according to the prescriptions. Methods: The study was conducted at the Eye Clinic of the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital (UCTH), Nigeria. Data were collected retrospectively from prescriptions (from January to December 2018) in the Pharmacy using the WHO core indicator form. Microsoft Excel® was used to organize and analyse collected data using descriptive analysis. Ethical approval was obtained from the health research ethics committee of UCTH, Calabar. Result: A total of 1098 prescriptions were accessed over the 12-month study period, 48% (531) of which were for females and 83% (915) for adults. Average number of drugs per prescription was 1.8. The percentage of drugs by generic name was 38.8%, drugs prescribed from essential drug list was 28.7% and antibiotics prescribed was 31.3%. Glaucoma (23%), conjunctivitis (19%) and refractive error (17%) were the most prevalent eye diseases found. Conclusion: Prescription pattern in this study site conformed to only one of the five WHO drug use indicators. High antibiotics prescriptions were observed, and eye diseases associated with bacterial infections were most prevalent in this study. Drugs should be prescribed with generic names and the essential drugs lists should be expanded to accommodate more drugs for glaucoma.

Assessment of Health-Related Quality of Life of Tuberculosis Patients in Lagos State, Nigeria

“…This is reflected in the social domain areas (e.g., social support and sexual activity) and the environmental domain (e.g., insecurity of life, access to information, physical and home environments, opportunities for leisure, transportation, and financial resources) of TB patients, which were more affected or impaired. This outcome corroborates the finding of Osahon and Okolo, 6 indicating that TB patients in South East, Nigeria, scored the highest on the social relationship domain, Thus the social domain was not much impaired. This is in line with the finding of Malik et al, 19 confirming that the social functioning of several TB patients was marginally impaired.…”

“…This questionnaire has good psychometric scores, having been validated and applied in previous related studies in Nigeria. 6 Content validity and face validity were quantitatively evaluated to determine the validity of the questionnaire. In this study, Cronbach's alpha coefficient was applied to examine the internal consistency of the WHOQOL-BREF scale (24 items), which was 0.91, and for physical, psychological, social, and environmental domains, the corresponding values were 0.79, 0.89, 0.70, and 0.81, respectively.…”

“…The previous study has shown that the HRQOL of TB patients in South East Nigeria is low. 6 However, only a few studies have attempted to find out HRQOL of TB patients in Lagos State, Nigeria, despite consistently being responsible for about 11% of the cases of TB registered in the country annually. 7,8 Assessing HRQOL is important, especially in chronic diseases such as TB because it can provide health-care providers with more information about their health status, its associated characteristics, and how to manage the infection.…”

Investigation and Comparison of Medicine Use in the three Central Referral Hospitals in Sierra Leone

“…All the patients in ODCH were children under 5years, only adult female patients were recruited in PCMH while male and females of various ages were obtained in Connaught hospital for the retrospective study. The average number of medicines prescribed in the three teaching hospitals (Connaught, PCMH and ODCH) were 4.07, 4.3and 3.3 respectively (Figure 1), which are higher than the WHO standard and results from previous researches carried out in two tertiary hospitals in Nigeria (Osahon, et.al, 2016 and2020).…”