Refining patient care: Evaluating prescription practices of medical residents and interns in a teaching hospital through an audit.

Objective: Hospitals in India use the National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare Providers guidelines as criteria to ensure safe prescribing practices. This audit was conducted to provide insight into in-patient prescription of drugs to (1) evaluate the quality of prescriptions (2) reduce prescription and medication errors (3) improve the quality of care in terms of prescriptions that the hospital provides to the patient.

Methods: The cross-sectional study was conducted in an in-patient department of a tertiary care teaching hospital in Chennai where 153 paper-based prescriptions were continuously collected from the internal medicine department over 1 month.