[Observations on real drug need of hospitals]

Authors indicate that a considerable share of the inpatient drug supply "gets out" of the institution, another remarkable share is administrated to patients due to polypragmasia. Consequently, in-patient drug-costs might be reduced by large amounts without jeopardizing the quality of care. Authors made attempts to measure the first of the two mentioned losses by repeated systematic observation of patients' clinical charts, while the second one was assessed by several peer-reviews. Illegal drug losses were tackled by involving an external ordinary drugstore, to deliver hospital staff members prescription drugs, while polypragmasia was successfully reduced by introducing changes derived from reports of peer-reviews, over the past three years. Additionally, since the most costly group of drugs is that of the antibiotics, an internal treatment protocol system was set up based on collective knowledge and consensus of all doctors. Authors recommend that once all listed management activities are introduced and conducted in a hospital, department-specific daily drug-cost rationing can be created fairly based on the average drug consumption of the respective department.