Quality of Prescriptions in a Tertiary Care Hospital in South-West Nigeria

The quality of prescribing influences to a large extent the health outcomes of patients as errors made could result in adverse drug reactions. The aim of this study was to assess the quality of prescription written by medical doctors in a tertiary healthcare facility in rural south-west Nigeria. A cross-sectional retrospective analysis of randomly selected prescriptions from all adult outpatient clinics of the hospital between October 1, 2010 and March 31, 2011 was carried out. The prescriptions were checked for the completeness of the patients’ bio-data (name, age, sex, and hospital number), accuracy of drug dosage and formulation, prescribing by generic name, use of abbreviation, legibility of prescriber’s writing, the name and signature of the prescriber. Six hundred and two (602) prescriptions were collected and used for analysis. A total of 2167 medications were prescribed with a mean of 3.6 ± 1.6 per encounter. All the prescriptions had patient’s name and hospital numbers written. The age, hospital number and address of the patients was recorded in 421 (69.9%), 480 (79.7%) and 323 (53.7%) respectively. The doctor’s name, signature and date of encounter was indicated 587 (97.5%), 546 (90.7%) and 556 (92.7%) respectively. The mean legibility score was 2.53 ± 0.51 out of a possible score 4. The findings of our study show that there is a need for improvement in the quality of prescription written by Nigerian doctors. The adoption of a computer –aided prescribing system would go a long way in achieving this objective.