Abstract

Background: Drug utilization study is an important tool to study the clinical use of drugs and its impact on health- care system. There is limited data from Indian medical intensive care unit (MICUs) on prescription patterns. Objectives: To study the drug utilization pattern in the patients admitted to the MICU.
Materials and Methods: A retrospective observational study was conducted in a 14 bedded MICU of rural tertiary care hospital. Indoor case papers of the patients st th admitted to the MICU between 1 January 2016 and 28 February 2016 were studied, and the prescribing pattern was analyzed using the World Health Organization (WHO) basic drug indicators.
Results: A total 234 cases with the mean age group of 48 years were evaluated, 141 (60.78%) of which were males and 93 (39.74%) were females. The most common cause of admission was suicidal poisoning (45.69%). The average duration of stay was 4.24 days. The average number of drugs prescribed per patient was 6.26. Pantoprazole, atropine, pralidoxime, ondansetron, and ceftriaxone were prescribed in more than 30% of the patients. Average antibiotic prescribed per patient was 1.12 and ceftriaxone (30.42%) was the most commonly prescribed antibiotic. 47.97% of prescribed drugs were from the WHO model list of essential medicines and 60.48% were according to their brand names. Conclusion: The findings of this study are comparable to those of other studies. However, there is a scope of improvement in areas such as overdosing, prescribing more by generic names instead of brand names and from WHO Model List of Essential Medicines.