National Control Laboratories in quality healthcare-a roadblock for substandard biopharmaceuticals.

Substandard or spurious drugs are a global problem with respect to Health and Economic burden. The impact is higher when medicines are from the category of life-saving drugs, essential medicines or high cost targeted medical treatment. Biopharmaceuticals are one such class of drugs where Quality testing plays a pivotal role to stop substandard drugs from reaching the patient. This study of 17,451 samples has highlighted the trend of occurrence of substandard biologicals (2.34%) over a decade (2011-2021) and the importance of continuous and complete evaluation of such Biopharmaceuticals. More such National Control Laboratories (NCL) should be involved in cross-checking the quality of the increasing number of biopharmaceuticals present in the market which are released only on the basis of the onsite inspection and dossier reviews. This will help the Regulators to ensure the readiness for testing the newer biologicals, devise effective policies for better health care initiatives and keep the substandard biopharmaceuticals at bay.

Prescription auditing and observational study in a tertiary care hospital

Background: Prescription is an important document written by a doctor which if not written properly can lead to various problems such as adverse drug reactions in patients, incompatibility to follow the instructions to take timely medications and sometimes over dosage due to improper prescription can even lead to death of the patient.Methods: This prospective observational cross-sectional study was conducted over a period of 6 months. The study was conducted in Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences, Ranchi. Various prescriptions were collected from outpatient care facilities of a tertiary care hospital. Results were analyzed and assessed on 150 prescriptions collected.Results: Total 150 prescriptions were evaluated out of which 49.3% were males and 50.7% were females. Various parameters were assessed during the study which showed that there is still a scope of improvement in prescribing patterns in areas of writing complete prescriptions, prescribing generic medications and mentioning drug dosage forms as well as time of administration in each prescription.Conclusions: The results showed there is still a scope of improvement in writing practices of prescription. The doctor should incur the habit of writing generic names of drug in every prescription. They should adopt proper handwriting skills and no mistakes should be done in a prescription. A good prescription written by a doctor will help in legible practice and will also be very helpful in patient’s care.