A STUDY ON DRUGS USE IN POST OPERATIVE MANAGEMENT IN THE DEPARTMENT OF SURGERY AT A TERTIARY CARE HOSPITAL

Surgical management cannot be completed without the use of antimicrobial and analgesic drugs. Pharmacotherapy with multiple agents before, during and after surgery is marked in present day indoor hospital settings.Irrational prescription may lead to severe postoperative complications.The present prospective observational study aims to evaluate the drug utilization patterns using WHO core indicators and to assess how much it confirms to standard treatment guidelines in the inpatient ward of surgery in a tertiary care hospital, by collecting the admitted cases of surgery as per the study criteria. A total of 104 cases were enrolled into the study for a period of 9 months.The results shown that, majority (43.26%) of the surgery cases were in the age group of 21-40 years. The majority of patients were males (67.30%) compared to females (32.70%). Majority of them were from rural area (74.03%) and the remaining is from urban area (25.97%). The majority of surgeries performed were clean- contaminated (46.15%). Anti-microbial agents were the most common class of drugs prescribed (35.14%), followed by analgesics (21.70%). Among antibiotics, antiprotozoals (33.33%) are the most preferred class with Metronidazole(31.80%) being prescribed major.Among analgesics, NS AI DS (75.62%) a r e t h e most preferred class with Diclofenac (53.12%) as major drug prescribed. Tazobactum + piperacillin (33.33%) is the major combination of drug prescribed. On an average 7.09% of drugs were prescribed per patient and percentage of encounter with an antibiotic was 2.5%.Percentage of drugs prescribed by generic name were 7.19%, while only 60.92% of all drugs were from WHO list of essential medicines. And the percentage of fixed drug combinations from WHO essential drug list is only 7.05%. In this study we observed that the prescribing practice for antibiotics, especially use of prophylactic antibiotics is high.Lack of generic name prescribing and low incidence of prescribing medicines from essential drug list are the concerns that need to be addressed. Keywords: Anti-microbial agents; Surgery; WHO Core Indicators.