• Menyfah Q Alanazi, Mahmoud Salam, Fulwah Y Alqahtani, Anwar E Ahmed, Abdullah Q Alenaze, Majed Al-Jeraisy, Majed Al Salamah, Fadilah S Aleanizy, Daham Al Daham, Saad Al Obaidy, Fatma Al-Shareef, Abdulaziz H Alsaggabi, and Mohammed H Al-Assiri.
• Drug Policy and Economics Center, King Abdulaziz Medical City, Ministry of National Guard-Health Affairs, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
• Infect Drug Resist. 2019 Jan 1; 12: 3241-3247.

BackgroundAntibiotic prescriptions at emergency departments (ED) could be a primary contributing factor to the overuse of antimicrobial agents and subsequently antimicrobial resistance. The aim of this study was to describe the pattern of antibiotic prescriptions at an emergency department of a tertiary care hospital in Saudi Arabia.MethodsA cross-sectional study, based on a review of antibiotic prescriptions was conducted. All cases who visited the emergency department over a three-month period with a complaint of infection were analyzed in terms of patient characteristics (age, sex, infection type, and number of visits) and prescription characteristics (antibiotic category, spectrum, course and costs). The World Health Organization and International Network of Rational Use of Drugs prescribing indicators were presented. Descriptive and analytic statistics were applied.ResultsA total of 36,069 ED visits were recorded during the study period, of which 45,770 drug prescriptions were prescribed, including 6,354 antibiotics. The average number of drugs per encounter was 1.26, while the percentage of encounters with a prescribed antibiotic was 17.6%. Among antibiotic prescriptions, the percentage of encounters with injection antibiotics was 15.2%. Almost 77% of antibiotics were prescribed by their generic names, and the percentage of antibiotics prescribed from the essential list was 100%.ConclusionThe average number of drugs per encounter in general and antibiotics per encounter in specific at this setting was lower than the standard value. However, the percentage of antibiotics prescribed by its generic name was less than optimal.© 2019 Alanazi et al.

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