Drug Utilization Evaluation of Meropenem in Surgical Patients in a Tertiary Trauma Care Hospital

Meropenem is considered as a potential drug for the treatment of Multi drug resistant gram –ve infections. The higher incidence of empirical prescription for this drug in hospitals will potentially increase the prevalence of resistance, making it an important candidate for execution of drug utilization evaluation (DUE). The primary objective of the study was to assess the Meropenem prescribed cases and evaluation of its appropriateness. Secondary objective was to find out the average cost spent solely for Meropenem pertaining to their respective specific and empirical therapies. A Prospective, questionnaire based study was conducted to evaluate the appropriate use of Meropenem. A total of 30 Meropenem prescribed cases were assessed in our study, which revealed 20% of empirical use and 80% of specific use, where 6.67%% of prescription was inappropriate. Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and the Enterobacteriaceae are the main MDR-GNB(multidrug resistant-gram negative bacteria) producing serious infections . There was an improvement of 66.67% after Meropenem use. According to APACHE II scoring, 50% of the patients had high risk for mortality in ICU, in which 57.17% of the patients got completely cured by the use of Meropenem. Considering the total ICU patients 78.57% of the patients got completely cured by the use of Meropenem. Total cost for the treatment with Meropenem expressed as mean ± SD= Rs.19490.50±14742.17. Mean cost of empirical treatment with Meropenem expressed as mean ± SD = Rs.14621.83 ± 8239.88. Mean cost of specific treatment with Meropenem expressed as mean ± SD = Rs.20707.65 ± 16167.01.