Читать книгу Fundamentals of Pharmacology for Paramedics - Группа авторов - Страница 24

Every drug will have a number of names. Knowing the correct name of a drug is vital in the prevention of medication errors, and becomes even more important when drugs can be identified by several different names. All drugs will have an individual chemical name which conveys very accurately (at least to a chemist!) the drug’s molecular structure. These names are usually long, difficult to say and impossible to remember, and they are usually left to research chemists. Many drugs can also be known by the name of the chemical class they belong to, such as opioids or benzodiazepines. But it is the generic, or official, name of the drug that health practitioners should always recognise a drug by. This name should be sufficiently different from any other drug name to minimise the risk of any drug being mistaken for another. With a few exceptions, generic names are usually the same regardless of where in the world you are, and they often derive in some way from the name of the chemical class of the drug, which is often convenient as it makes it easy to identify the class a drug belongs to by its generic name. The generic names of drugs belonging to the statin class of drugs, for example, end in ‐statin, with agents such as atorvastatin, rosuvastatin, fluvastatin and simvastatin. Generic names of drugs belonging to the beta‐blocker class end in ‐olol and include propranolol, atenolol, pindolol and nebivolol.

Many drug formulations will also have a trade name given to the particular drug formulation by the company that produced it. These names may relate to the generic name or they may relate more closely to their therapeutic use, but because of the multiple formulations available and multiple companies producing them, the trade names of drugs will vary widely depending on where the drug is sold and what it is sold for. Needless to say, these names are not a reliable way to identify the drugs but unfortunately, they are often the most prominent and eye‐catching name on the packaging, which will mean that patients will usually refer to drugs by the trade name, unless they are receiving a generic version of the drug. To try and reduce confusion, the Australian government, for example, passed a law, effective February 1, 2021, that requires prescribers to write the generic name of the medication first on any prescription, either without a trade name or with the trade name in brackets after it. Combined with requirements for drug manufacturers to make the generic name of the active drug in the medication more prominent on the packaging than the trade name, the aim is to increase awareness of the active ingredients in medications and to reduce confusion.

With the huge range of drugs currently licensed for use, there are often multiple individual drugs available for any particular indication, so it is important that we also classify our drugs to make talking about them easier. We can classify drugs based on their chemical structures, mechanism of action or broader area of therapeutic use. The functional classifications (those relating to what the drugs do or what they are used for) are the most widely used, as they reflect the clinical uses of the drugs, but we often refer to certain groups of drugs by their chemical classification, as usually all agents belonging to a certain chemical class also have a predictable effect on function. Table 1.1 gives some examples of the ways in which drugs are named and categorised.