Compliance of a Secondary Health Facility to the Nigerian Antimalarial Treatment Policy

Abstract

In Nigeria, the change from chloroquine and other antimalarial monotherapy treatment to artemisininbased combination therapy (ACT) was introduced in 2004 due to evidence-based national and international findings. This one-year retrospective study describes the level of compliance to the national antimalarial treatment policy in our health institutions using the Central Hospital, Sapele in Delta State as a case study. Records of antimalarial prescriptions as well as patient biodata were systematically collected using a data form. A total of two hundred and fifty prescriptions on case management of malaria from January to December 2005 were randomly selected such that the prescribing habit of a cross section of the clinicians was obtained. Artemisinin based combination drugs were the most frequent antimalarials prescribed, they accounted for 73(28.2%) of the total antimalarial prescription. This was closely followed by artemisinin monotherapy 66(25.4%), others were chloroquine 56(21.6%), quinine 46(17.7%), sulphadoxine/pyrimethamine (SP) 14(5.4%) and halofantrine 7(2.7%). Chloroquine and quinine were still the drugs of choice in treating malaria in pregnancy. The level of compliance of the doctors in this health facility to the national anti-malarial treatment policy was quite low and various antimalarial monotherapies including chloroquine were still being used as first line drugs for malaria treatment.

Keywords: Antimalarials, guidelines, treatment policy

Nigerian Journal of Pharmaceutical Research, Vol. 8 No 1 pp. 72 - 77 (September 2010)