Prescribing Pattern of Antibiotics in Bacterial Infectious Diseases in a Corporate Care Hospital

Background: The antibacterial preparations are commonly used to control various bacterial infections, which may vary from one hospital to other. Hence, understanding the antibiotic practice will help the pharmacist gain knowledge and implement the safe use of drugs.

Objectives: To assess the antibacterial use in the management of the selected bacterial infections

Methodology: This study is a retrospective, observational, cross-sectional study over six months as per the inclusion & exclusion criteria in the Inpatients. A well-designed questionnaire was used for collecting the required data, and the obtained data were subjected to descriptive statistics.

Results and Discussion: Out of 334 cases observed, 54.19% were female, and 45.81% were male. The mean stays 3.81±2.21 days. Acute gastroenteritis was

59.58%, followed by UTI 25.15%. Pneumonia was 8.68%, and 6.29% had COPD. 0.30% had Acute gastroenteritis with UTI. 39.87% of patients were overweight18.35% were obese, and only 3.16% were underweight. Most of them were in the age group of 61-70, and the least was from 10-20. The mean age of the patients observed in this study was 55.21 ± 18.46. Single antibiotic therapy in 142 cases,165 cases had two antibiotics, in 24 instances three antibiotics were used, in 4patients 4 antibiotics were used for management of the infections. The commonly used antibiotics in managing bacterial infections are penicillin, cephalosporin, carbapenems, macrolides, Nitorimidazoles, quinolines, etc. The clinical outcome showed all the patients were improved, except 3 cases were discharged on request. 139 drug-drug interactions were present in this study and metronidazole (63.01%) was found to have highest major drug-drug interactions. The average cost of antibiotics used in treating Pneumonia (6534 Rs), AE of COPD (4459.7 Rs)., UTI 3778 Rs, acute GE 1176.2 Rs.

Conclusions: This study showed that pharmaceutical care services are essential in the bacterial infection management for the prevention of drug-drug interactions and minimization of the cost (rational drug usage promotion)