Objective:To estimate the frequency and type of prescription errors in patients receiving cancer chemotherapy.Settings and Design:We conducted a cross-sectional study at the day care unit of the Regional Cancer Centre (RCC) of a tertiary care hospital in South India.Materials and Methods:All prescriptions written during July to September 2013 for patients attending the out-patient department of the RCC to be treated at the day care center were included in this study. The prescriptions were analyzed for omission of standard information, usage of brand names, abbreviations and legibility. The errors were further classified into potentially harmful ones and not harmful based on the likelihood of resulting in harm to the patient. Descriptive analysis was performed to estimate the frequency of prescription errors and expressed as total number of errors and percentage.Results:A total of 4253 prescribing errors were found in 1500 prescriptions (283.5%), of which 47.1% were due to omissions like name, age and diagnosis and 22.5% were due to usage of brand names. Abbreviations of pre-medications and anticancer drugs accounted for 29.2% of the errors. Potentially harmful errors that were likely to result in serious consequences to the patient were estimated to be 11.7%.Conclusions:Most of the errors intercepted in our study are due to a high patient load and inattention of the prescribers to omissions in prescription. Redesigning prescription forms and sensitizing prescribers to the importance of writing prescriptions without errors may help in reducing errors to a large extent.
ObjectiveTo raise awareness about the importance of public pharmaceutical standards, identify if and, if so, where current pharmacopeias are falling short in the development of new and complete monographs and foster collaboration among the various pharmacopeias, to prioritize, develop and make available standards for those key medicines for which no complete monographs exist.MethodsIn August 2017, we mined eight pharmacopeias to identify which of the 669 medicines in the 20th edition of the World Health Organization’s Model List of Essential Medicines were covered by complete or incomplete monographs. The pharmacopeias we included were the Brazilian Pharmacopoeia, the British Pharmacopoeia, the Indian Pharmacopeia Commission, the International Pharmacopoeia, the Japanese Pharmacopoeia, the Mexican Pharmacopoeia, the Pharmacopeia of the People’s Republic of China and the United States Pharmacopeia.FindingsFor 99 (15%) of the medicines on the Model List, no monographs were available in any of the eight pharmacopeias investigated. Only 3% (1/30) of the cardiovascular medicines listed, but 28% (9/32) of the antiretroviral medicines and 23% (6/26) of the antimalarial medicines lacked monographs.ConclusionThere appear to be no public standards for many so-called essential medicines. To address this shortfall, a greater collaboration in the global health community is needed.
SUMMARYThe impact of training traditional birth attendants (TBAs) on the utilisation of maternal health services at a rural health training centre in India has been studied. Records of the utilisation of the services for two periods of six months each (one before training and one after) have been analysed. A marked improvement in the registration of antenatal cases at an earlier date in pregnancy has been observed. The average number of visits to antenatal clinics, the immunisation against tetanus, and the presence of trained personnel at the time of delivery all showed considerable improvement after the local TBAs had been trained and motivated. The differences observed in the two series were statistically significant.Midwifery services in India are far from satisfactory. Mostly these services are provided by traditional birth attendants (TBAs) who carry on this profession as a family right. Poor utilisation of the available maternal health services, which are still scarce, makes things worse. There are various reasons why people do not use the available services, among which lack of awareness and confidence are important. The TBA is often the one person who caters for the maternal health needs of our community and although untrained and illiterate she enjoys the confidence of the masses. Therefore, motivation and training of TBAs might go a long way towards improving the take-up of maternal health services in rural areas. An attempt was therefore made to review the utilisation of maternal health services available at the Rural Health Training Centre, Vallabh Nagar, attached to the RNT Medical College, Udaipur, before and after the start of TBA training courses.
The vast volume of complex, multidimensional data generated by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Ananya program to improve maternal, child, and integrated health in Bihar, India, compelled the program to develop a strong visual analytics system. This was necessary to synthesize information and enable Ananya's managers to visualize and interpret data to make effective and informed decisions. The visual analytics system embraces three applications-a GIS, a data visualization tool, and a program dashboard-that collectively depict program indicators, providing managers with current assessments of program progress and performance. While distinct in their roles and objectives, the applications are complementary in nature. The applications are in various stages of prototype development and upon deployment will become connected to the system through Ananya's GIS application. This is a unique strategy for the sustainability of the system. In addition to its novel sustainability plans, the system offers a one-ofits-kind application of geo-information technology to improve maternal and child health in Bihar and unique visualizations of program data to support decision making.
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