The prescribing pattern of hospital doctors.

OBJECTIVE

There has been no local data on the prescribing habits of doctors over the last 25 years. This is a retrospective study done to examine the outpatient prescribing pattern of doctors at Alexandra Hospital over a one month period in 1995.

METHOD

Six-thousand five-hundred and three scripts were analysed. A total of 16,642 items were prescribed. The distribution of prescription scripts by departments included Accident & Emergency 39.0%; Medical 23.5%; Orthopaedics 10.3%; Surgery 18.5%; Paediatrics 4.4%, and Geriatrics 4.3%. The overall mean number of drugs prescribed was 2.6 (median = 2, mode = 2, range = 14).

RESULTS

Analysis of the overall results by age groups showed the following means for "total number of drugs prescribed": (> 0 to 20 years) = 2.23, (> 20 to 40 years) = 2.42, (> 40 to 60 years) = 2.61 and (> 60 years) = 3.18. Analysis of variance showed highly significant results between the means of each age-group. Post-hoc analysis revealed that the oldest age group (> 60 years) accounted for most of this significant result. The top 10 drugs used by the hospital were (in descending order): NSAIDs, antacids, analgesics (other than NSAID), antibiotics, topical medications, anti-diarrhoeal agents, anti-histamines, vitamins, anti-emetics and promethazine cough syrup. There was a high usage of NSAID-antacid combination. Similarly, amoxycillin was often given with cloxacillin. There was an underuse of anti-depressants. There were very few (0.15%) illegible prescriptions. Only one prescription had an adverse combination of drugs.

CONCLUSION

This is the first local study of prescribing pattern of a hospital. While this data may vary from hospital to hospital, depending on the patient mix, it does provide some useful baseline data which hitherto never existed. Our findings suggested that the elderly do receive more medications.