Practitioner Prescribing Habits for Pharyngitis: Implications for Evaluation and Management

ARACELIS D. FERNANDEZ, MD (bottom right), is a third-year fellow in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at The New York Hospital – Cornell University. She did her pediatric residency at The Children’s Hospital at Albany Medical Center. Emerging bacterial resistance patterns suggest that clinicians should use restraint in prescribing antibiotics for various infections. We used pharyngitis as the model for studying prescribing habits, because many clinicians recommend that culture results be analyzed before antibiotics are prescribed. We compared prescribing habits of three groups: practitioners in the Pediatrics, Adult Medicine, and Urgent Visit Departments. Overall, 55% of patients were treated while culture results were pending. Nurse practitioners and physician assistants were more likely than physicians (including osteopaths) to treat patients with pharyngitis who had negative culture results (57% vs 38%). Our results thus show that practitioners should be encouraged to avoid overprescribing for this common condition.