Evaluation of Drug Prescription Pattern among General Dental Practitioners in Rasht, Iran

Irrational drug prescription is a controversial issue around the world that inter-feres not only with the patient's life but also with the society and economy. Despite few studies, there is no enough data on the prescription ha¬bits of dental practitioners. So, we aimed at eva¬luating the same issue in Rasht, Iran. This cross-sectional re-trospective study; reviewing a convenience sam-ple of 850 dental prescriptions selected randomly from social insurance prescriptions; assessed for two parameters: The first for WHO drug indica¬tors such as the mean number of drugs per pre¬scription, the percentage of durgs with generic name, the percentage of prescription with anti¬biotics and injectives, and the second for the pre¬scription errors. Chi-sqaure test was used for analyzing the data. The average number of drugs per pre-scription was 2.64±0.85. Drugs with generic names constituted 82.9%. 93.8% of prescriptions had at least one antibiotic, whereas 26% had in-jectives. Combination of antibiotics and NSAIDS (Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) were the most common prescribed drugs. The mistakes related to drug form, name, quantity, dose, dose interval as well as route of administration were 18.4%, 22.5%, 16.5%, 14%, 39.6%, 94.9% respec¬tively. Average number of drugs, percentage of antibiotics and injectives per prescriptions, mis¬takes in drug quantity, dose interval and route of administration were lower in prescriptions of fe¬male prescribers than in males. Polypharmacy, overuse of antibio-tics and prescription errors among the prescrip-tions of dental practitioners were common. Conti¬nuous training of dentists would be necessary to improve the quality of prescriptions.