Prescribing patterns in medical outpatients.

A drug utilisation review was carried out in the medical outpatient department of the Manipal teaching hospital, a tertiary care hospital in Pokhara, western Nepal, to determine the prescribing frequency of commonly used drugs. An attempt was made to relate prescription data to age and sex of the patients. A total of 530 prescriptions were analysed, and the mean +/- SD drugs per prescription was 2.15 +/- 1.71; 67.4% of the drugs were prescribed by brand name and only 39.56% of the drugs prescribed were from the WHO essential drug list. The average cost of drugs per prescription was US$2.75 +/- 2.21. The frequency of prescribing of antiulcer drugs, antibiotics, antiasthma drugs, antihypertensives and analgesics was 24.15% (n=128), 23.96% (n=127), 20.56% (n=109), 19.81% (n=105) and 15.09% (n=80), respectively. This study revealed considerable scope for educating prescribers to improve their prescribing practice.