The effects of prescription patterns/practices on the performance of the pharmacy Department of Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital

Abstract

Medicine use evaluations are structured, methodical and criteria-based medicines assessment systems which is key in assessing trends of medicines use in a defined setting. Poor drug prescription practices are inappropriate, result into irrational medicines use and most times leads to avoidable stock out of drugs. Medicine use evaluations are important in hospital settings that face challenges of serious stock outs. These are meant to study the patterns of drug use to change the prescription patterns accordingly.

On prescription by clinicians, patients are meant to pick drugs from the respective pharmacies in Mbarara RRH. The pharmacies can service prescription to a level that is commensurate to what they have in stock. This is what we see being transcribed as the prescription fill rate whereby some prescriptions are fully serviced, other are partially filled in terms of both the full prescription and servicing partial doses of individual medicines

Prescription in public health is guided by the Uganda Clinical Guidelines and the essential Medicines lists. Some hospitals have moved ahead to design their own institutional medicines lists to guide prescription. Clinicians are required to prescribe and keep within the guidance of the Uganda clinical guidelines, institutional medicines list and the essential medicines list since these are the mother documents to which orders for medicines are generated. Prescription outside the guidance of the latter means that the prescription will not be serviced thus the patient will be unable to access medicines.

Mbarara RRH being a high volume facility, receiving all sorts of health complications and with a wide range of prescribers is prone to having challenges involving access to medicines thus necessitating a medicine evaluation to be done as prescribed by this report so as to address the medicines funding gap in the institution. This will address the high health pocket expenditure by patients, majority of whom live below the poverty line