Assessing the Quality of Prescription Writing Skills among the House Officers in Lahore, Punjab

Abstract

Introduction: Prescription is a written instruction or order from health care professional for a patient. It is one of the substantial steps for patient management. A prescription error refers to the failure in the process of prescription writing resulting in erroneous instructions.
Objective: The aim of this study was to analyze the quality of the perception writing skill among the house officers of different public sector hospitals.
Methods: It was a cross-sectional descriptive study conducted on 300 junior doctors during the period of one month (from 1st October 2018 to 31st October 2018). A clinical scenario based survey form was planned and a complete prescription was demanded in response. Each of 300 completed forms was evaluated for all 23 required parameters and scored accordingly.
Results: Most of the script lacked the significant information in the form of missing parameters. Some of the most frequently documented indicators were patient’s name (99 %), age (95.33 %), drug dose (95.33 %), strength (94 %), frequency (92.33 %), route(90 %) and duration of treatment (91%). The most neglected parameters were hospital name (0 %), hospital address (0 %). Most prescribers identifiers were also ignored except for mentioning of doctors name (15 %) cases and signatures (99%) scripts . Some other important parameters like drug’s generic name, quantity and drug instructions were also found to be missing.
Conclusion: This study revealed the un satisfactory quality of prescription demanding vigorous interventional steps to be initiated in this regard.
Keywords: Prescription, Generic name, Writing skills, House job.