Rational Use of Drugs: A way to improve the quality of health care

Abstract

Patients have been using drugs for a long time to cure or control diseases and symptoms. Drugs can do good or can do harm to the users. Indiscriminate use of drugs also can endanger patient’s lives. Drug therapy therefore requires knowledge, judgment, skill and wisdom, but above all a sense of responsibility1.

Irrational prescribing has further complicated the drug use problem. Numerous studies done at developed and developing countries, describe it as a pattern consisting of polypharmacy, use of drugs that are not related to the diagnosis, irrational use of antibiotics and self-medication, with many drugs taken in insufficient quantities. Rational prescribing is therefore one important aspect of rational use of drugs2 . The impact of irrational use of drug is reduction in the quality of drug therapy leading to increased morbidity and mortality.

One of the most widely used and abused drugs all over the world are pain-killers. Fever and pain are usually the early symptoms of most of the inflammatory diseases. The introduction of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) was a landmark event and soon these drugs became the most widely used medication not only for the relief of pain and fever but also for their anti-inflammatory effect3.

The main aim of this study was to obtain information regarding the prescribing pattern with respect to pharmacological subclasses of NSAIDs by the medical prescribers in the OPDs of some selected polyclinics in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah.