[Quality assessment of long-term prescription records: QMP study]

The growing concern surrounding health safety issues makes it essential that everyone, in particular the elderly due to their commonly prescribed multiple drugs, has a complete and up to date list of prescriptions. We planned to assess the quality of the electronic records of prolonged medication.

This is an observational, transversal and descriptive study, with an analytical component, in which we assessed the technical quality of prolonged medication records of elderly patients of four primary health care, before and after a guided intervention. The doctors received training in good practice recording methods and both professionals and patients were stimulated to use the prolonged medication guide.

We evaluated 388 medical records of 33 physicians. The ideal category 'Appropriated medication with posology' improved from 23.5% to 48% (p < 0,001). The remaining categories 'Inappropriated Medication' and 'Appropriated medication but absent posology' decreased from 16.7% to 7% (p = 0,006) and from 59.8% to 46.0% (p = 0,02), respectively. The variables mentor's training skills, workplace, length of family practice and the percentage of elderly in the physician's list showed statistical significance differences at the beginning of the study which disappeared after the intervention, except for the latter.

In this study, physicians accepted the proposed changes, regardless of age, gender, mentor's training skills, workplace or length of family practice. Longer duration appointments in the eldery group may be an obstacle in achieving the best results.

This original study reveals the necessity to implement periodic postgraduate training to encourage physicians to keep medical records up to date.