DRUG UTILIZATION STUDY IN POST-OPERATIVE PATIENTS IN SURGICAL WARD OF A TERTIARY CARE TEACHING HOSPITAL, JODHPUR (WESTERN RAJASTHAN)

Kamal Kumar Batar, Archana Vyas, Rajkumar Rathore and Anusuya Gehlot*

ABSTRACT

Multidrug therapy before, during, and after surgery is mostly used in indoor post-operative patients. Medicines such as parenteral analgesics, IV fluids, and antibiotics are commonly used. There are inadequate data on monitoring of possible use or misuse of such medicines. There is lack of drug utilization studies in surgical indoor post-operative patients. Hence, the current study was conducted to assess the drug utilization patterns specially in post-operative patients in the inpatient ward of the Department of General Surgery - tertiary care hospital Jodhpur (Rajasthan). We collected data from 300 patients admitted in post-operative general surgical ward in a tertiary care teaching hospital over a period of one year. We analyzed the data by using WHO Prescribing indicators. Antimicrobials, IV Fluids and analgesics were most commonly prescribed, they were used in all study patients (100%). The average number of drugs per encounter was 7.40. The parenteral route of administration (89.08 %) was the most common route, followed by oral route (10.52%), inhalational route (0.39%) was the least commonly used route. Use of generic drugs was high (98.78%) and most of the drugs were prescribed from Essential medicines list 2019-20 of Rajasthan (97.64%). Which shows that the therapy was cost effective and there was successful implementation of EML in our Government hospital.

Keywords: Drug utilization study, Post-operative Patients, Surgical ward, indoor Patients.