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Background Irrational drug use is a worldwide problem at all levels of health care, especially in hospitals. Prescribers in community tend to omit hospital prescribing practices, thus this problem is present at all levels of health care. Use of medicines can be greatly improved and wastage reduced if simple principles of drug management are followed. To help in solving this problem, World Health Organization (WHO) has designed prescribing core indicators that were used to evaluate drug prescription patterns in Rwanda Social Security Board (RSSB) affiliated patients.Material and Methods A retrospective cross-sectional study with quantitative analysis was carried out for a period of six months. Among the 1000 prescriptions collected, 18 of them were rejected for not fulfilling the inclusion criteria, the remaining 982 prescriptions were almost distributed equally from either private and public hospital or clinics. The study analyzed prescriptions from health facilities located in Kigali City, Rwanda. The results were presented in table with comparisons with the WHO prescription indicators.Results The average number of drugs per prescription is 2.4 which is higher than 1.8 recommended by WHO. The percentages of drugs prescribed with a generic name and those from National Essential drug List are 28.5% and 61.1% respectively, which are very low compared to WHO target of 100% for both core prescribing indicators. The percentage of encounters with an antibiotic prescribed is 42.5% and the encounters who received an injections account 1.2%.Conclusion This study revealed that there is a big gap in implementing WHO core indicators of prescription and concerned stakeholders should take measures to address this issue. |
