Legal Aspects of Dental Antibiotic Prescriptions: A Descriptive Study in a Large Brazilian City

Abstract

Objective: To quantify the antimicrobial drugs most commonly prescribed by dentists since the institution of legal controls in Brazil and to identify the presence of errors in the legal requirements of some of these drugs. Materials and Methods: This is a cross-sectional study of dental antibiotic prescriptions at 69 drug stores in a chain of pharmacies in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. A calculated sample of dental antimicrobial drug prescriptions was selected using simple random sampling from a total of 31,105 prescriptions. The following data were analyzed: the type of antimicrobial drug; the presence of a prescription in accordance with the Common Brazilian Nomenclature (DCB); the name, gender, age and address of the patient; the name, signature, address, telephone number, Regional Dental Council registration number and stamp of the prescriber. After double entry in the Epi-Data program, a descriptive analysis was performed using SPSS version 19.0. Results: A total of 366 dental antimicrobial drug prescriptions were analyzed. The majority of the antimicrobial drugs prescribed were from the penicillin group (71.9%; CI95% 67.0-76.2), 99.7% of which were amoxicillin with or without clavulanic acid. The second most commonly prescribed drugs were the macrolides (16.7%; CI95% 13.2-20.8). The majority (92.8%) had 3 to 5 errors. The most frequent errors were as follows: spelling of the drug name not in accordance with the DCB (72.1%), and the absence of patient information such as age (99.7%), gender (99.8%), and address (87.0%). Conclusion: Antimicrobial drugs of the penicillin and macrolide groups were prescribed most often by dentists, and the majority of those prescriptions had three to five errors, with spelling of the drug name not in accordance with the DCB and missing patient information as the most common errors.