Igbiks Tamuno1 
,
Joseph O Fadare2
For correspondence:- Igbiks Tamuno Email: igbikstamuno@yahoo.com
Received: 2 February 2011 Accepted: 19 January 2012 Published: 21 February 2012
Citation: Tamuno I, Fadare JO. Drug Prescription Pattern in a Nigerian Tertiary Hospital. Trop J Pharm Res 2012; 11(1):146-152 doi: 10.4314/tjpr.v11i1.19
© 2012 The authors.
This is an Open Access article that uses a funding model which does not charge readers or their institutions for access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read), which permit unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited..
Purpose: To evaluate the prescribing pattern of clinicians in the general outpatient unit of the Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, Kano (AKTH),.
Methods: This was a descriptive retrospective study conducted using 500 prescriptions made at the general outpatient unit of AKTH between April and July 2009.
Results: A total of 497 prescriptions were successfully analyzed. The average number of drugs per encounter in the facility was 3.04. Generic prescribing was low at 42.7 % while antibiotic prescription was high at 34.4 %. Injections were prescribed in 4 % of encounters while 36.2, 19.1, 25.8 and 1 % of encounters had analgesics, antimalarials, antihypertensives and anxiolytics prescribed, respectively. Vitamins were prescribed in 9.7 % of encounters.
Conclusion: Polypharmacy, low rate of generic prescriptions and overuse of antibiotics still remain a problem in health care facilities in Nigeria.. This calls for sustained interventional strategies and periodic audit at all levels of health care to avoid the negative consequences of inappropriate prescriptions.
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