Rational Use and Prescription of Drugs: A Review on WHO's 12 Strategies

During the past 10 years, drug budget have grown enormously from 500 million Dollars to 3 billion Dollars in Iran. Irrational drug prescription can cause additional costs on people/government and can waste the resources. Designing and implementing appropriate interventions to control drug prescription and usage can be effective in controlling the issue. This study was carried out to presenta framework for the most important reasons of the WHO's 12 strategies about irrational use and drug prescription.
In this review article, we have searched the Google, Google scholar, SID, Magiran, Irandoc, and the PubMed with the following keywords: WHO's Strategies, rational prescribing, rational drug use, and rational use of medicine. A total of 70 related articles published in the two last decades were retrieved. After excluding the unrelated articles, data of 43 articles were extracted and analyzed.
According to this study, WHO's 12 strategies were classified in four educational, managerial, regulatory, and financial dimensions. Most studies had been focused on the educational and managerial strategies that seemed to be the most important reasons of irrational drug prescription.
The results of this study provided information on the WHO's strategies in different countries. The results can be used by the policymakers to consider different dimensions of rational use and prescription of drugs in planning appropriate programs.