Initiation and Evaluation of Drug Information Services at a Tertiary Care Teaching Hospital in South Telangana

Drug information service is the provision of written or verbal information about safe use of medications or drug therapy in response to a request from any health care professional. A prospective observational pilot study was initiated at a 1000 bed tertiary care teaching hospital to create an awareness, implementation and evaluation of the drug information services. Institutional ethics committee has approved the study and the hospital authorities permitted the service. The drug information service activity was started at clinical pharmacy department in the hospital and Pharm. D interns and the faculty was involved in the study. Drug information queries were collected during ward rounds and also through direct access. The ultimate question was analyzed after receiving the query, suitable references were reviewed and the final answer was synthesized and the approved answer was provided to the requester. Periodically the quality assurance of the information provided was assessed using quality assurance check list. A total of 154 queries were received during the study period. Most of the queries (69) belong to the category of drug of choice. Majority queries came from general medicine (45 %) and emergency medicine departments (16 %). Post graduate students (40 %) and medical interns (38 %) were the major requesters. Both verbal and written answers were provided to 136 queries. Majority queries received were during ward rounds and answers were provided within 8 h. The quality assurance score for the randomly selected queries was found 4.9 out of 5 indicate good quality service. The study findings suggest that drug information services were well utilized by the health care professionals. However, there is a need to create awareness among all health care professionals regarding usefulness of this service.