Cost-Effective Antibiotic Prescribing

Antibiotic pharmacoeconomics: an attempt to find the real cost of hospital antibiotic prescribing.

Antibiotics account for a large part of all hospital pharmacy budgets, but the actual cost of their prescription is unknown. These costs include intravenous administration, labour, serum antibiotic assay, monitoring of haematological and biochemical indices, disposal of sharps and adverse effects. An in-house method of costing antibiotic therapy is presented, to quantify these hidden expenses. ...

Tensions in antibiotic prescribing.

Since 1999, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has funded seven centers across the country to provide practical guidance to physicians and other health care professionals about the drugs they prescribe. These Centers for Education and Research on Therapeutics (CERTs) develop, translate and disseminate objective information on drugs to improve practice. The University of Pennsylvania...

Trends in antibiotic prescribing.

Frischer et al., through analysis of the West Midlands General Practice Research Database, identify a reduction in antibiotic prescribing of 16 per cent between 1993 and 1997. They also demonstrate that this decline in antibiotic prescribing was concentrated in conditions such as respiratory tract infection. More recent data support a further fall in the overall prescribing of antibacterials by...

Antibiotic stewardship: prescribing social norms

With a burgeoning world population, expansions in medical intervention, and intensifi ed agriculture, the need for antibiotic stewardship is increasingly clear. Declining effi cacy of antimicrobial prophylaxis for surgery or chemotherapy, and emergence of pan-resistant pathogens, warn of a post-antibiotic era. In the evolutionary arms race of antimicrobial resistance, rejuvenating the neglected...

antibiotic and interventions to reduce inappropriate prescribing