Prescribing Trends in the outpatient Department in A Rural Hospital in Bangladesh

This study was carried out to find the medicine-prescribing pattern in outpatient department of Medicine, Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics in government and private hospitals in Faridpur city, Bangladesh. To see the patterns of prescriptions of 250 patients were collected over a period of three months and analyzed for the average number of drugs per prescription, number of drugs prescribed per prescription, most common diagnosis, most commonly prescribed antibiotics, most commonly prescribed groups of drugs, percentage of drugs prescribed by generic names, percentage of drugs prescribed from Essential Drug List (EDL) of Bangladesh. The average number of medicines per prescription was 4.14 and 48.8% patients were prescribed up to 3 medicines. Only 37.I6% drugs were prescribed from EDL of Bangladesh. Percentage of encounters with an antiulcer ant, a NSAID and a multivitamin & mineral prescribed were 29.25%, 18.15% and 9.84% respectively. It was evident that 73.6% [184] of the prescriptions contained antibiotics. Cefixim and ciprofloxacin were found to be the most preferred antibiotics in physician’s prescriptions survey. The diseases, which were seen in the studies, include cough, typhoid, diarrhea, nausea, chronic UTI, RTI, fever and rhinitis. The result of the present survey indicates that antibiotics are widely and inappropriately practiced without following standard guidelines. This is an alarming condition in the health sector of Bangladesh and therefore, the respective authority should take necessary steps to minimize the harmful effects of antibiotics.