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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| The quality of psychotropic drug prescribing in patients in psychiatric units for the elderly | | Author(s) | P Nirodi, A J Mitchell |
| Journal title | Aging & Mental Health, vol 6, no 2, May 2002 |
| Pages | pp 191-196 |
| Source | http://www.tandfonline.com |
| Keywords | Drugs ; Psychogeriatric units ; West Yorkshire. |
| Annotation | The quality of drug prescribing to 112 psychiatric inpatients in two psychiatric units in West Yorkshire was followed over a 7-year period. A standardised assessment sheet was used to assess 320 prescriptions for psychotropic drugs, using medical notes and drug charts.Patietns with dementia and functional illness were defined by ICD-9 or ICD-10 criteria. Severity of illness was measured by the presence or absence of symptoms in six discrete symptom clusters. Two raters examined prescription quality. 20% of prescriptions for patients with dementia were illegible, significantly higher than in functional illness. In both groups, among prescriptions of regular medication, one third had information missing on either dose, intended frequency, or indication for use. For prescriptions for re-required medication, two-thirds contained the missing information. Prescriptions were legible and free of all errors in only 20 of 112 cases (18%). Quality of as-required medication was inferior to the prescription of regular medication, particularly for dementia patients. The authors conclude that errors are common in prescribing for older psychiatric patients, particularly for as-required medication and for patients with dementia. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-020613216 A |
| Classmark | LLD: LDM: 88 |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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