This manual defines a limited number of objective measures that can describe the drug use situation in a country, region or individual health facility. Such measures, or indicators, will allow health planners, managers and researchers to make basic comparisons between situations different areas or at different times. In addition, when an intervention is undertaken to improve aspects of drug use, the indicators can be used to measure impact. Indicators can also serve as simple supervisory tools to detect problems in performance by individual providers or health facilities
