Prescription and Prescribing: An Overview of Basic Concepts Mostly Overlooked

While drugs have the capacity to enhance health, they all have the potential to cause harm if prescribed inappropriately. For this reason, it is recommended that healthcare professionals who prescribe medications exercise critical thinking skills to ensure the safe and effective use of therapeutic agents. Pharmacists have crucial role plays in both handling prescription and prescribing. A rational prescribing is the sole of patient safety, compliance and patient relief. This paper proposes aims that a prescriber should try to achieve, both on first prescribing a drug to maximise effectiveness, minimise risks and costs, and respect the patient's actual need.

Background: Historically, the pharmaceutical and medical professions have devoted considerable time and effort to the development and rational utilisation of safe and effective drugs for the treatment and prevention of illness. Today, that successful effort continues, helping to achieve the highest standards of health in the world for the American people. But in order to gain maximum benefit from the use of drugs while minimising their adverse side effects, prescribers and pharmacists must maintain effective communications not only among themselves, but with their patients as well. The directions for drug use and other information which prescribers indicate on prescription orders and which pharmacists transfer to prescription labels are critical to safe and effective drug therapy. In order to assure that this information is conveyed clearly and effectively to patients, the following guidelines have been developed by the American Pharmaceutical Association and the American Society of Internal Medicine.