Publication:

Effect of educational intervention on the knowledge and attitude on prescribing amongst interns of a tertiary care hospital: a questionnaire based study

Background Prescribing correct therapy is the essential part of physicians and therefore, adequate knowledge and confidence on drugs efficacy, safety, cost, and convenience is important. Understanding the knowledge and perceptions of medical students will help to identify the problems in clinical pharmacology teaching. Prescribing performance and competence can be significantly improved by training and giving feedback to the prescriber. The objective of the study was to evaluate and compare the effect of educational intervention in enhancing the knowledge of medical interns on prescribing practice.

Methods A Cross sectional, Educational Interventional observational study was conducted using two copies of a pretested validated questionnaire (Pre & Post CME) with 15 questions among 110 MBBS interns. They were subjected to a continuous medical education on rational prescription writing followed by a hand’s on training on prescription writing in which they were divided into 9 batches and asked to prescribe for the case scenario given to them and the same was audited and feedback was given.

Results Out of 110 internees’, 105 (95.50%) and 95 (96.90%) had completely filled the pre & post educational intervention questionnaire. The overall knowledge and attitude of interns has improved after the intervention. Significant increase (P value < 0.0001) in the Mean + Standard deviation value from 5.81 + 2.1 to 7.35 + 3.18 is noted on applying Paired t Test. All the prescriptions were rational. The formats of their prescriptions were scrutinized and the precise way of writing the same was explained to the interns.

Conclusions This study clearly shows that early sensitization of Physicians about rational prescription writing during Internship phase by means of educational intervention/training program can reduce the number of prescription errors.