Study of prescribing pattern of antimicrobial agents in selected patients attending tertiary care hospital in India

Abstract

Antibiotics are the most commonly prescribed drugs in hospitals and their irrational use is one of the important factors for the development and spread of resistance. The objective of this study was to evaluate the antibiotic prescription pattern in the patient attending the tertiary care hospital. It was found that a total of 333 antibiotics where prescribed in 245 prescriptions. The average number of antibiotics per prescription was approximately 1.4. The most commonly used antibiotics were moxifloxacin 19.5%, metronidazole 10.4%, amoxicillin + cloxacillin 10.2% and ciprofloxacin 6%. antibiotics were almost equally prescribed to both male and female. 45.5% of the antibiotics shows adherence with the National List of Essential Medicines of India. 76.6% of the antibiotics were single products while 23.4% were fixed dose combination. The most commonly used dosage forms were tablets (57%), drops (23.5%) and creams (11.7%).57.3% were prescribed irrationally. Quinolones (48.2%) and antifungals (21.5%) were the most common types of prescribed antibiotics in which irrationality was found.