Paper Title
A Study on Prescribing Pattern of Drugs in Lower Respiratory Tract Infection among Children Aged less than 12 Years

Abstract
This prospective observational research study was conducted to evaluate the rationality of prescribed antimicrobials in paediatric lower respiratory tract infections in a tertiary care hospital in Nepal for 6 months during December 2016 to May 2017 . Paediatric patients under 12 years of age diagnosed as lower respiratory tract infection without any other co-morbidity were selected for the study. Data was collected by using a self-designed data collection form.After analysing the data, it revealed that that out of 125 patients the percentage of male and female patients were 59.24% and 40.76% respectively. A total of 98 patients were prescribed with antibiotics and amongst which 81 patients were prescribed with single antibiotic and 17 patients were prescribed with dual antibiotic combination. Most commonly used antibiotic as a single drug was amoxicillin + clavulanic acid (41.83%), whereas most commonly used antibiotics as combination was ceftriaxone with amikacin (9.1%). Average drugs per prescription, percentage of prescriptions with an antibiotic prescribed and percentage of prescriptions with an injection prescribed were2.9, 78.4% and 41.6% respectively. Average number of drugs per prescription was optimal according to world health organization prescribing indicators. Keywords - Antimicrobials, Paediatrics, Rationale therapy, Lower respiratory tract infection.