Prescription of drugs not listed in a clinic's pharmacopoeia: supervision by clinical pharmacologists.

The pharmaceutical market in the FRG offers about 11,000 different preparations and formulations. A restricted list (pharmacopoeia) containing approximately 1,000 drugs has been proved to cover the routine requirements of a university clinic and most of the additional drugs demanded by the physicians as 'exceptis excipiendis'. Restrictive control of requests for drugs not included in the internal pharmacopoeia by clinical pharmacologists has reduced the absolute number of requests by half, and about 60% of the remaining requests could be replaced by drugs listed in the pharmacopoeia. The majority of the special requests arose from the continuation of drugs presented to out-patients by the resident physicians after admission of the patient to the hospital. The supervision may lead to more critical revision of out-patient medication, but a substantial reduction of drug expenditure was not attained, as the drugs requested amounted only to a minor fraction of the overall drug expenditure by the hospital.