Evaluation of the Effect of Drug Promotional Literature on Prescribing Pattern using WHO Prescribing Indicators and Other Relevant Parameters

ABSTRACT Background: Medicines are an integral part of health. It becomes essential to promote rational drug use. The relationship between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry has gained increasing attention recently. So there are chances that detailing activities by pharmaceutical representatives may lead to an undesirable effect on the prescribing pattern of doctors, like polypharmacy and use of fixed drug combinations; hence this study was planned to evaluate the effect of evaluation of the effect of drug promotional literature on prescribing using WHO prescribing indicators (DPL) on the prescribing pattern of doctors. Setting and Design: This prospective observational cross-sectional study was performed in a medical college and tertiary care center in Maharashtra. Materials and Methods: 30 DPL and 10 prescriptions from each doctor were collected. Such total of 3000 DPL and 1000 prescriptions were collected from 100 doctors. Statistical Analysis: The prescriptions and DPL were analyzed together, and information was entered in Microsoft Excel; the parameters were calculated in percentage. Results: This study highlighted that drugs prescribed by generic name were 3.36%, the percentage of antibiotics prescribed was 27.37%, and the percentage of prescriptions containing medicines from the essential medicine list (EML) or formulary was 44.07%. In this study, 27.9% of drugs in the prescriptions were those drugs that are advertised in the DPL. Conclusion: Polypharmacy, prescribing drugs by brand names, drugs out of national list of essential medicine, use of more fixed drug combinations (FDC), antibiotics, and nutritional supplements could be attributed to the effect of DPL on the prescribing pattern. Hence it could be said that there is an association between a greater reliance on the promotion of medicines by the pharmaceutical companies and inappropriate prescribing patterns.