Publication:

Study of drug utilization pattern in gynecology department of tertiary care hospital of Rajasthan, India

Background With increasing awareness the flow of patients visiting gynecology outpatient department has increased. Drugs used in gynecology are one of the most selling drugs in India, however they are least studied with respect to drug utilization. Thus, present study was undertaken to analyse drug utilization pattern of Gynecology OPD in a tertiary care hospital.

Methods A retrospective, cross sectional, observational study of prescriptions in Gynecology OPD of Jhalawar medical college, Jhalawar. Data was obtained from medical record database of patients that attended Gynecology OPD from October 2017 to March 2018 over period of six months. Prescription records of patients were screened as per inclusion and exclusion criteria and 300 prescriptions were randomly selected. Patient related, and drug related information was collected on a customized data collection sheet.

Results The mean age of patients was 20.5±8.65 years and common age of presentation was >18-30 years. In infective cases, PID (40.6%) was common, and in non-infective cases, menorrhagia (23.8%) was common. The average number of drugs per prescription was 5.2. In drug category, minerals (46.4%) were most commonly prescribed, followed by antimicrobials (27.6%), and NSAIDs (20.1%). Polypharmacy was observed in 100% of the prescriptions.

Conclusions In the present study all of the drugs prescribed were generic which were from the essential medical list of NLEM and WHO. This study revealed deviation from rational prescribing by the prescribers because average number of drugs per prescription was significantly higher than that recommended by WHO.