Assessment of Prescription Medications for Indoor Patients and Effect of Interventions in a Medical College Hospital.

Abstract

Bharati Vidyapeeth University Medical College Hospital and Research Centre in Pune, India has been a pioneer institute with 831 beds, with learned faculty, residents, and trained nursing and supportive staff. Top management decided to further improve quality and safety in patient care and accordingly felt the need to acquire accreditation under the banner of National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare Providers (NABH). As a first step toward this, a quality assurance department was established and entrusted with the task to identify areas needing improvement. "Prescription profile of medications" was identified as one of the core areas needing improvement as medication errors are mostly due to faulty prescriptions. The aim of this study was to measure the compliance of indoor patient prescriptions towards standard guidelines. Top management of the hospital envisaged that preparing for NABH accreditations would be one of the tools for improving patient safety and quality. Hence, in addition to a quality assurance department, a separate department of clinical pharmacy and pharmacovigilance was also established, specifically to take care of medication safety, including prescription profile. Interventions were designed based on observations in the preintervention phase. Interventions included regular monitoring of prescriptions, medication safety, and repeated training sessions for physicians by the department of clinical pharmacy and quality assurance. Compliance by physicians regarding most of the components of prescriptions showed improvement. There has been a substantial reduction in medication errors (in patient days). The improvement in compliance of components of prescriptions and reduction in medication errors was attributable to applied interventions.