Evaluation of a Method of Prescribing Drugs in Hospital, and a New Method of Recording Their Administration

Death and Drug Treatment in a Psychiatric Hospital

“…A list of deaths is kept by the Medi cal Records Department. Further details about patients were obtained from their case notes, and information about drug treatment was available from the drug pre scription and recording sheets [Crooks et al, 1967].…”

Errors of drug prescribing.

“…Although medical and administrative problems associated with hospital drug prescribing must have existed since the first prescription was written in the first hospital, it is only in recent years that they have claimed our attention and attempts have been made to identify and quantify them (Crooks, Weir, Coull, McNab, Calder, Barnett & Caie, 1967;Vere, 1967). The main reason for this has been the rapidly increasing number of pharmacologically active drugs used in clinical medicine coupled with the persistence of hospital drug handling systems designed in an era when effective drug treatment, and therefore, the number of drugs prescribed, was limited.…”

“…Apart from ensuring that patients actually receive the drugs prescribed, the increasing number of drugs available has produced an information explosion which increases the possibility of inappropriate prescribing on the basis of indications, doseage required, drug interactions, etc. (Crooks et al, 1967). The report in this issue (Tesh, Beeley, Clewett & Walker, 1975, p. 403) of an investigation of these two problem areas of hospital prescribing is therefore welcome.…”

“…While many of the writing errors were trivial, it was felt that they could have resulted in overdose or in under-treatment. The relatively high use of approved names in the Birmingham study (90% of prescriptions) probably reflects the practice in a medical ward with an interest in therapeutics, since in a study of over 7000 prescriptions from a complete hospital group, approved names were only used in 48% (Crooks et al, 1967). In order to reduce proliferation of drug names which refer to the same active agent, the use of approved names where possible, as followed by the Birmingham Centre, is probably the most acceptable in hospital prescribing.…”

Methods in Monitoring

“…This is based on the system of hospital drug prescribing devised by Profs. Crooks and Weir and their colleagues [Crooks et al, 1967]. Although the numbers of patients are large (virtually the hospitalized population of north-east Scotland) the database is relatively small.…”