- Biomedical Research (2010) Volume 21, Issue 4

A prospective drug utilization evaluation of analgesics and pain assess-ment in postoperative urological patients in a Tertiary care hospital

Drug utilization evaluation is a one time study to assess appropriateness of drug therapy. Pain is the most frequent cause of suffering and disability and impairs quality life. The management of post operative pain has long been recognized to be inadequate. Our study aims to evaluate drug utilization pattern and proper usage of analgesic to reduce the post operative pain in patients undergoing urological surgeries. A total of 208 patients underwent urological surgeries aged above 20 years were selected of which 168 were males and 40 were females. The study details were explained to the participants about the importance of pain management and also use of Visual Analog Scale (VAS). The post operative pain of the pa-tient was assessed by VAS every 2hours on the Operative day, Post operative day 1 and Post operative day 2. We studied the analgesic utilization pattern in these patients and the inten-sity of pain relief with the analgesic prescribed on the Operative day, Post-operative day 1 and Post-operative day 2. The Mean pain scores were 4.29, 3.00 and 1.98 on Operative day, Post operative day 1 and Post operative day 2 respectively. Mean reduction in pain scores between males and females were almost similar. Though there was a slight higher pain scores in females on Operative day and Postoperative day1 and slight decrease in pain scores on Postoperative day2 compared to males. In our study, there is significant reduction in pain scores from operative day to postoperative day2, implying that proper utilization of prescribed drugs can bring about a positive outcome.

Author(s): Swamy RM, Venkatesh G, Nagaraj HK

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