Decision-Making and the Barriers to Judicious Antibiotic Use.

Escalating antibiotic resistance is a “multinational public health crisis.” As children are heavy consumers of antibiotics and serve as community reservoirs of resistant organisms, promoting judicious pediatric antibiotic use can have high impact. Decreasing prescribing rates over the past decade have recently plateaued; young children still receive, on average, .1 antibiotic prescription per year, most for broad-spectrum drugs, with 25% of antibiotics prescribed for diagnoses for which antibiotics are unlikely to be of benefit.