Assessment of prescribing practices in community pharmacies in Windhoek, Namibia: a focus on antibiotics
Globally, medicine misuse is not something to be taken lightly. Moreover, the accelerated occurrence of antibiotic resistance is related to imprudent antibiotic use, which is extremely concerning. Low- and middle-income countries, like Namibia, are particularly vulnerable to misuse of medicines. Medicine use practices in public health settings often vary from those in private health settings, and in Namibia, whilst there is reasonable data on medicine use in public facilities, very little is available on the same in private facilities. Aim This study assessed the prescribing patterns in community pharmacies in Windhoek, Namibia, focussing on antibiotics to gauge the magnitude of the problem. A retrospective cross-sectional study was conducted using an adapted, validated WHO methodology. The study population consisted of all community pharmacies in Windhoek and the prescriptions for one year before the study. A multi-stage sampling method was used, with a stratification technique to randomly select 25 out of 71 community pharmacies and a systematic random technique to select 108 prescriptions per pharmacy, making a total of 2700 prescriptions. Data was retrospectively captured by the researcher and two trained research assistants using two data collection forms adapted from WHO-validated tools. Data analysis was conducted using the latest version of IBM’s Statistical Package for Social Sciences (IBM/SPSS/Statistics/28.0) to describe prescribing indicators and identify irrational use practices, including antibiotic use patterns.
Prescribing indicators, Antibiotics, Prescribing practices, Rational prescribing, Irrational prescribing
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