Assessing the quality of patient care and setting standards through performance review should become part of everyday clinical practice. Medical audit overseas the observance of standards of medical treatment of all levels of health care delivery system. Prescription surveys are components of the medical audit which provide a relatively unbiased picture of prescribing habits and also identifies aberrant or suboptimal prescribing. Few such surveys have been undertaken mostly at tertiary care hospitals on sample sizes of 200-250 prescriptions. But this survey encompasses screening of over a hundred thousand OPD prescriptions of secondary level government hospital. With such a huge sample size it has been possible to investigate disease morbidity, drug utilization, core prescribing indicators in pediatric, adult and geriatric patients collectively, and also study the trends in prescribing. Results indicate that there is considerable scope for improving prescribing practices through prescriber education and public awareness on issues like gender bias and health.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Anurag Agarwal
Anurag Agarwal is a graduate engineer from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur. He later joined the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). He was the managing director of the Punjab Health Systems Corporation (PHSC), responsible for management and control of 156 secondary level government hospitals having bed capacity ranging from 30 to 400 beds. He was also the project director of a World Bank assisted project of about $ 100 million, to revamp and modernize secondary level health care in the state of Punjab. He was the Head of the Department for a prestigious 800 bedded Institute of Mental Health at Amritsar. Currently, he is the Director General School Education, Punjab.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rupinder Walia
Dr. Rupinder Walia obtained her postgraduate medical qualification in Dermatology and Venereology from Government Medical College, Patiala. She has since then been working in Punjab Civil Medical Services, in various rural and urban hospitals of Punjab. She has also worked as assistant director in the World Bank assisted project to revamp and modernize the secondary level health care in the state of Punjab.
There are no reviews yet.