Assessment of prescription quality and incidence of drug therapy problems among patients in selected primary health facilities in Maiduguri metropolitan area, Borno State

Abstract

Background: The quality of medicine utilization at PHCs has been a matter of concern because of lack of skilled healthcare professionals and challenges with government funding. There is little information on quality of drug utilization following the use of PHCs as the major provider of basic medical services for internally displaced persons in Borno State. This study therefore aims to assess quality of drug prescriptions and also identify drug therapy problems (DTPs).

Material and Methods: This was a cross sectional retrospective review of prescriptions obtained from the medical records of 1000 patients in five PHC. Demographic data, drugs prescribed, diagnosis and other relevant information were extracted from medical records. WHO/INRUD core prescribing indicator was used to assess prescription quality, while DTPs were identified using Beers criteria, STOPP/START, NORGEP criteria. The data was entered into Microsoft excel and cleaned before being loaded into SPSS version 21 for analysis using descriptive statistics.

Results: The most prescribed drugs included analgesics (100%), antibiotics (79.6%), antimalarials (48.6%) and antihypertensives (25.9%). DTPs were identified in more than half of all prescriptions (52.5%) and mostly involved antibiotics (38.8%), analgesics (28.5%), proton pump inhibitors (23.3%) and corticosteroids (10.4%). DTPs found included wrong drug, untreated conditions, unnecessary drug therapy and polypharmacy.

Conclusion: Drugs prescribing quality was poor and characterized by high level DTPs, irrational antibiotic use and polypharmacy. This may increase the risk of microbial resistance to commonly used antibiotics and adverse drug reactions.