Background Regulatory compliance of prescriptions is a key aspect of good performance of pharmaceutical validation within the hospital. Several irregularities have been detected in daily practice.

Purpose Estimate the nature and prevalence of irregularities in prescriptions at a teaching hospital’s pharmacy in order to establish an action plan.

Material and methods A one-day study (October 2017) conducted on all (out/in) patients’ prescriptions at the teaching hospital. The patient registration number was verified systematically via a dedicated software ADMIS.

The quantitative and qualitative analysis of prescriptions was done via SPSS software v23. The analysis of multivariate data was made by Kiviat Diagrams.

Results The analysis was based on 590 prescriptions, of which 393 were from the external pharmacy and 197 from hospitalised patients.

The prescriptions were completely delivered in 80% of the cases. Ninety-five per cent of the validated prescriptions pharmaceutically were from the hospitalised services against 73.7% for prescriptions resulting from the consulting services.

All the prescriptions bore the correct registration number corresponding to the right patient, and treatment duration was present in 100% of the cases.

The non-conformity (absence/illegibility) was due to the prescriber’s stamp in 11.9%, the date of prescription in 3.1% of cases and the seal of the service in 7.5% of all cases corresponding to 11% of outpatients.

The origin of the non-compliance issued mainly from the haematology department (11.4%), followed by cardiology (10.5%) and endocrinology (8.8%), and in 25% of cases the service was unidentifiable.

This critical analysis of the regulatory aspect allowed us to identify several causes requiring a plan of action, mainly: non-availability of the stamps of some freshly graduated doctors; the ink was not available; superimposition of service and prescribing stamps; and forgetting the stamp on the prescription.

Consequently, official letters were sent to all physicians reminding them about regulatory requirements for medical prescribing. An evaluation is planned within a year.

Conclusion Regulatory validation of prescriptions is a preliminary and essential step in pharmaceutical validation. A critical analysis of the irregularities makes it possible to establish a plan of action with specific procedures and proves periodically necessary as an indicator of the good functioning of the system.

References and/or acknowledgements No conflict of interest.