80 % of doctors prescriptions at LASUTH anonymous —Study

Less than  20 per cent of all the audited prescription had the initials or signature of the prescriber at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, Lagos, a study has said.

The presence of the prescriber’s initials or signature has legal implications due to the prescriber accepting the responsibility and consequences of writing the prescription.

It also indicated that only 0.8 per cent of the prescriptions written by doctors at the hospital comply  excellently with the World Health Organisation’s recommendation.

The study indicated that  up to 88 per cent of these prescriptions had good compliance, eight per cent had average compliance while 0.5 per cent had poor compliance with excellent prescription writing at the 550-bedded hospital.

The researchers said although all the audited prescriptions were written by doctors, the date of prescription were documented in 97 per cent.

In addition, 96.6 per cent were legible, 96.7 per cent had the patient’s name while 70 per cent indicated the age of the patients. The strength of the drug was written in only 66.1 per cent. The prescriber’s name was written in 54 per cent and information for package label was documented in 4.3 per cent.

In all, only 0.8 per cent complied excellently, 65.8 per cent were good, 29.8 per cent were average while 3.6 per cent rated poorly.

This audit of 611 prescriptions presented from August 2017 to October 2017 was published in the 2018 edition of the Journal of Advances in Medicine and Medical Research. It involved Barakat A. Animasahun; Motunrayo O. Adekunle and Olusola Y. Kusimo.

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In this study, four clinical departments that receive a large turnout of patients’ prescriptions were medicine department (63 per cent), surgery department (29 per cent), paediatrics department (seven per cent) and obstetrics and gynaecology department (one per cent).

There was a very low number of prescriptions whose originating department was indicated, which made the prescribing source to be missing in more than 70 per cent of the prescription.

Although there is not currently any rule on the validity of prescription in Nigeria, the date of prescription is needed to be able to know the validity of a prescription in countries where there is a time limit for the validation of a prescription.

They, therefore, indicated the need to develop a standard prescription policy at the hospital to help in reducing medication errors.

Writing a prescription is indeed a vital part of the rational therapeutics, since a poorly written prescription can make a clinical consultation a waste of time, and cost human lives.