Antibiotic prescribing in public and private practice: a cross-sectional study in primary care clinics in Malaysia

Table 1 Summary of National Medical Care Survey (NMCS) 2014 dataset

	Public	Private	Overall
Total clinics	129	416	545
Patient encounters	11,172	16,415	27,587
Prescriptions^a	9680	15,119	24,799
Total number of medications	27,762	45,417	73,178
Prescriptions containing antibiotics^b	755	5055	5810
Total number of antibiotics (systemic)	767	5242	6009
Antibiotic prescribing rate^c, %	6.76	30.79	21.06
Antibiotic per 100 patient encounters	7	32	22

^aEach patient encounter in which medication was prescribed was counted as one prescription
^b197 prescriptions (12 from public clinics, 185 private clinics) consisted of more than one antibiotic
^cPercentage of encounters in which at least one antibiotic was prescribed

ISSN: 1471-2334