Author(s): Janaki R. Torvi and Suman Dambal
A prescription by a doctor may be taken as a reflection of physician’s attitude to the disease and the role of drug in its treatment. Feedback from the study would help both the pre-scriber and institutional authorities to review their prescribing practices and modify if nec-essary to facilitate better health care delivery. To evaluate the prescription patterns and to generate data on rational/irrational prescribing in patients suffering from upper respiratory tract infections attending paediatric OPD at a tertiary hospital. A prospective cross sectional study was conducted and the prescription data of patients with upper respiratory tract in-fection were collected for a period of three months. A total of 667 drugs were prescribed to 300 patients suffering from upper respiratory tract infection. Drug classes with largest rep-resentation were the antibiotics (37%). Penicillins represented the largest antibiotic drug class (76%). The most commonly used group of drugs were antibiotics out of which penicil-lins were largely prescribed. From the data it is understood that the administration of anti-biotics was inappropriate as the duration of treatment was insufficient (3 days). Over pre-scription of antibiotic for insufficient duration may increase the risk of resistance.