TY - JOUR A2 - Miró, Òscar AU - Kaur, Sharonjeet AU - Rajagopalan, Sujit AU - Kaur, Navjot AU - Shafiq, Nusrat AU - Bhalla, Ashish AU - Pandhi, Promila AU - Malhotra, Samir PY - 2014 DA - 2014/05/05 TI - Drug Utilization Study in Medical Emergency Unit of a Tertiary Care Hospital in North India SP - 973578 VL - 2014 AB - Objective. To generate data on the drug utilization pattern and cost of drug treatment and to determine the rationality of prescriptions. Methods. A retrospective cross-sectional drug utilization study was conducted in the medical emergency unit of our hospital. Patient case records were reviewed to extract data on the pattern of drug use. Cost of drug treatment for the emergency visit was calculated by referring to the cost mentioned in Monthly Index of Medical Specialties and the rationality of prescriptions was evaluated using WHO core indicators of drug utilization. Results. 1100 case records were reviewed. Majority of patients received proton pump inhibitors followed by multivitamins. The median cost per prescription was 119.23$ (7.32$–7663.46$). Majority (49.9%) of drug cost was driven by antibiotics alone. An average of 4.9 drugs was prescribed per prescription. There were 14.89% encounters with antibiotics. 75.17% of the drugs were given as injectables and only 29.27% of the drugs were prescribed as generics. Conclusion. There is need to rationalize the drug therapy in terms of increasing prescribing of drugs by generic name and to avoid overuse of PPIs and multivitamins in emergency unit. Also the hospital pharmacy should be encouraged to procure more cost effective alternative antibiotics in future. SN - 2090-2840 UR - https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/973578 DO - 10.1155/2014/973578 JF - Emergency Medicine International PB - Hindawi Publishing Corporation KW - ER -