Assessment of Quality of Out-patient Prescriptions in the National Health Insurance Scheme Unit of a Tertiary Hospital in Nigeria

ABSTRACT The fact that today's evidence based guidelines recommends several drugs in the treatment of a single medical condition make drug treatment particularly challenging. Consequently, many patients use a number of medications a situation referred to as polypharmacy. Polypharmacy is linked to occurrence of health risk through increased drug therapy problems like adverse drug reactions, medication error, adherence problem, economic burden etc. This study characterized the quality of out-patient prescriptions in National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) of the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital, using some selected indicators of Polypharmacy. These include contraindication, drug interaction, drug for treating side effect of co-prescribed drug and inappropriate dosages. Five Hundred out-patient prescriptions were used for the study. The average number of drug per prescription was 3.95±1.51. About 20.4% of the encounter received prescription with inappropriate combination of five or more drugs. Of this, contraindicated drugs constituted 22.2% of all encounter. There was association between inappropriate prescription and number of drug per prescription (p<0.05). The incidence of inappropriate prescription, potential drug therapy problems, and inappropriate polypharmacy were significantly higher at drug level ≥5 drugs. There is the need to improve on rational prescribing of drugs by retraining of health care providers