Assessment of drug use pattern for lower respiratory tract infection in outpatient department of paediatric at central referral hospital: a cross-sectional study

Background: Prescription audit is an important tool to analyse rational use of drug at different health sectors. The aim of the study was to evaluate the prescribing pattern using World Health Organization prescribing indicators for lower respiratory tract infection in children below five years of age.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in the outpatient department of Paediatrics at Central Referral Hospital, Gangtok, Sikkim, India for a period of 18 months. Study involved children between 1-5 years of age with fever/cough with or without respiratory distress. The data were collected from the out patient department prescription slips as well as interviewing the parents/guardians after finishing the physician consultation. The data were processed using statistical software SPSS 20.Results: The study was conducted with 57 prescriptions comprising 210 drugs from both male (54.38%) and female (45.61%) patients. The average number of drugs per prescription was found to be 3.68. negligible (0.013%) prescription containing generic name of drug was found, 96.66% of medicines were prescribed from National Essential List of Medicine (NELM). No prescriptions were found to have injectables, 8.57% of the prescriptions were found to contain fixed dose combination. Amongst the drug categories, salbutamol accounted for 23.33% in total prescription followed by paracetamol (22.85%) and amoxicillin (7.14%). While accounting for the formulations used, the maximum prescriptions were containing syrup followed by nebulization.Conclusions: The use of generic names was minimal, only few of the prescriptions had vitamins and tonics with no use of injectable preparations. Maximum numbers of drugs were prescribed from NELM