Abstract
To evaluate prescribing patterns and laboratory requests for patients attending a primary care clinic, in a teaching hospital, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Method: A cross sectional study was conducted at a teaching hospital primary care clinic, King Khalid university hospital, College of medicine, King Saud University, during January, February and March 2009. Data collection form has been completed by a consultant family physician at the end of the consultation for each patient entering a primary care clinic. Verbal consent has been taken from each patient in the study. The data collection form included: the age, number of drugs prescribed, number of laboratory, radiology, and ECG requests. The data has been collected and analysed by the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 11.5. P value was considered ignificant if it was less than 0.05%.
Results: The total number of patients included in the study was 243. The study showed that 75.7% of consultations ended with prescription of drugs to the patients, and 88% of the consultations ended with laboratory requests. Only 9.9% of consultations ended with radiology request, and only 2.5% of consultations ended with ECG order. The cross tabulation between age groups and prescription patterns was significant, as was the cross tabulation between age group and laboratory requests significant.
Conclusion and recommendations: The prescription patterns of drugs and requesting laboratory investigations at Primary Care level is high, which needs to be reviewed and audited to improve the quality of care and to decrease the cost and burden on the patient and health system facilities.
Further national studies are recommended to assure proper evidence based scientific utilization of resources like drugs and laboratory investigations towards improving the quality of patient care, and to be a more evidence-based, scientific, cost effective health care system.