Evaluation of Prescriptions and Types of Medication Prescribed by General Dental Practitioners in Qom, Iran, 2018-2019

The rational prescription of the drug and consideration of its principles affect the treatment outcome. Regarding this, the purpose of this study was to evaluate prescriptions to check if they follow the given principles and investigate the prescribed medications by dentists.

This descriptive-analytical, cross-sectional, and retrospective study was conducted on 238 prescriptions administered by general dentists in Qom, Iran, during the second semester of 2018-2019 academic year in the form of social security and medical services insurance in the RUD Committee of Qom University of Medical Sciences, Qom. The data evaluated in this study included patient age and gender, prescribed medications and their forms, medication category, route of administration, and prescription errors.

Oral, injectable, and topical drugs were prescribed at the frequencies of 97.5%, 34.5%, and 5%, respectively. Furthermore, antibiotics, painkillers, corticosteroids, mouthwash, and other medications were prescribed in 97.6%, 85.7%, 8.4%, 3.8%, and 2% of the prescriptions, respectively. With regard to the prescription problems, 40.3%, 4.2%, 39.5%, 14.3%, 16.4%, and 57.1% of the prescriptions had no drug dose, wrong drug dose, no drug consumption order, wrong drug consumption order, wrong form of medication, and incomplete drug name, respectively. Furthermore, 3.4% of the prescriptions had misspellings, 5.5% of them were eligible. However, none of the prescriptions had problems related to drug interaction or the lack of seal, signature, and date.

In the present study, the error rate of writing prescriptions and administration of antibiotics and analgesics was higher than the figure recommended by the World Health Organization.