Prescribing Pattern of Analgesic Drugs at Boru Meda Hospital, North East, Amhara, Ethiopia

Introduction: Pain is the sensory and emotional experience, which altered human health and well-being. When pain does not resolve, it may be associated with a serious disease, condition, or injury that needs timely medical care and also irrational prescribing of analgesics, which is possible to lead to unwanted side effects. Therefore, this study has been intended to evaluate the prescribing pattern of analgesics drugs at Boru Meda Hospital. Method: A retrospective cross sectional descriptive study was conducted. A total of 200 prescriptions containing analgesic were systematically collected by using well designed and pretested Data collection format. The necessary information was extracted from the prescription sheets by trained pharmacists and later analyzed using SPSS version 20 software. Result: Regarding prescribed analgesic acetaminophen 115 (36.9%) was the most prescribed, and then followed diclofenac 83 (26.6%) and Ibuprofen 64 (20.5%). The maximum number of analgesic drugs was administered to patients by oral rout (75%), which is followed by parenteral (19%). About dosing approach 94% acetaminophen prescribed as needed (PRN) based, whereas ibuprofen 59.4% and tramadol 40% were prescribed as twice a day (bid) based. Acute fibril illness (13.6%) was the highest reason for prescribing analgesics. Conclusion: Majority of the prescription analgesics drugs were prescribed as PRN dosing approaches with a very large percentage of oral medications. Some of the prescriptions revealed irrational prescribing of analgesics, in accordance of clinical indication, frequency of administration and combination of analgesic.