Tag: Keywords: Poisoning

Background The Drug and Poison Information Center (DPIC) at King Khalid

Background The Drug and Poison Information Center (DPIC) at King Khalid University Hospital, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was founded in 1983. cases. Using multivariate regression analysis, significant predictors of suicidal attempts are more than 12?years old, patients who were exposed to more than one toxin and patient who came to the hospital within 1C3?h since poisoning. Recommendations Establishing and operating DPIC centers throughout the kingdom, in buy Troglitazone addition to implementing of legislations to ban over the counter selling of medications and to sell potentially dangerous chemicals in buy Troglitazone childproof containers. Keywords: Poisoning, Saudi Arabia 1.?Introduction King Khalid University Hospital (KKUH) is a 770-bed tertiary care, teaching facility. KKUH is located in the city of Riyadh, the capital of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Riyadh is a city of around 4,000,000 population including both Saudi population and non-Saudi expatriates from different parts of the world. KKUH mainly serves Riyadh city and the central region of the Kingdom. As it functions as a referral teaching hospital, cases are being referred to KKUH from all over the Kingdom for further assessment and specialized management (Saddique, 2001). The Drug and Poison Information Center (DPIC), a major part of the pharmacy set-up, was founded in 1983. At times, it was the only available, well-equipped and qualified center in the area. It has been offering its valuable, informative and referenced advice to the medical hospital personnel, other medical facilities in the area in addition to the general public. Since then DPIC has responded adequately to queries from medical (i.e., physicians, pharmacists, nurses) and non-medical callers from allover the Kingdom. Queries ranged from simple material identification to poisoning cases. It covered queries regarding indications, dose calculations, frequencies, side effects, overdose management, stings and bites management, poisoning advice and other pharmaceutical and medical issues. National Drug and Poisoning Information Centers (DPIC) as well as worldwide centers, are staffed by pharmacists, nurses, and physicians who Rabbit polyclonal to FAR2 have specific expertise in the provision of drug and poison information services (AlArifi et al., 2003). The original mandate of the Center called for the development of centralized services to assist health professionals in providing optimal levels of drug therapy and poison management. Eventually, these centers are utilized by pharmacist in their daily practice followed by physicians as a resource to provide the best possible care by facilitating the rational use of drugs (Asiri et al., 2007). During the period from 1983 to 1987, there were 7142 cases of accidental poisoning among children admitted to all Riyadh governmental hospitals. Household products were the most common poisoning agent, accounting for 59% of all cases followed by drugs (39%). Children aged one to two years were probably the buy Troglitazone most affected and the fatality rate was 0.1% (Al-Sekait, 1989). A 10 yr retrospective study (1986C1996) of poisoning instances at King Khalid university hospital, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia exposed similar findings to reports of poison centers in US, where CNS depressants constituted the major group of ingested medicines, however, the majority of cases involved accidental ingestion by unsupervised children (Saddique, 2001). Inside a prospective study on 178 instances of accidental home poisoning admitted to the main childrens hospital in Riyadh poisoning was found to account for 5.6% of the total annual admissions (Mahdi et al., 1983). AlHazmi (1998) reported that poisoning account for 7.2% of general hospital admissions to the pediatric departments in Jeddah (western of Saudi Arabia) (AlHazmi, 1998). This incidence of accidental child years buy Troglitazone poisoning is quite high, compared with similar studies carried out in the USA (Litoviz et al., 1991; Litovitz and Manogurra, 1992), UK (Lawson et al., 1983), and different areas of Saudi Arabia (Al Hifze et al., 1995; Khalil, 1986). This study is a further in-depth assessment of the pattern and conditions of poisoning in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia through critiquing data from DPIC in King Khalid University private hospitals, Riyadh. 2.?Methods This is a retrospective study of referred instances and calls received by DPIC. All records and paperwork forms during the study period were investigated. DPIC uses standard forms to record and document all incoming calls, queries and referred poisoning instances. These forms are arranged to standard level to consist of: (a) info regarding the medical pharmacist handling the case, the caller identity, and the poison in question and (b) info concerning the poisoning case, such as time of poisoning and hospital introduction, poison type, symptoms and management. Other data collected include answers for.