Utilization of Recently Established Drug Information Centers Located in the Public Hospitals of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: An Assessment.

A drug information center is a unit designed for receiving, collecting, analyzing, and providing unbiased, accurate, and up-to-date information about drugs and their use. The drug information centers located in 4 public hospitals of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, were assessed in this study. They received a total of 467 drug information queries during their functional period until the time of this study. Among these queries, only 409 were eligible to be included in the analysis. The majority of the queries were from public hospitals (69%), mostly from health care professionals (94.9%), out of which physicians were the highest (49.7%), followed by pharmacists (32.8%). The study found that the most frequently encountered requests were related to therapeutic use (17.3%), followed by general product information and product availability; the highest number of queries concerned the use of anti-infectives (29%).