Training

Location: West Bengal, India.

Setting: Outpatients, ambulatory care.

Design: Population-based Cross-sectional, Observational – for the first objective Questionnaire
Structured interview / observation

• The questionnaire in vernacular (Bengali or Hindi) would be pre-design and pre-tested and would be administered by the research student himself.
• The Beer’s Criteria for inappropriate medication use in the elderly will be used to assess the quality of drug prescribing.
• The OOP expenditure on medicine by the elderly will also be estimated.
• Prospective, interventional DUR for comparative cohorts – for the second objective.
• Patient counselling
• Academic detailing for prescribers

The nature of the DUR intervention would be by two modes, viz., a random sample of households / families in two communities, one rural and one urban will be studied prospectively over a period of one calendar year to assess the impact of DUR on OOP expenditure on medicines by the elderly subjects in such families.