The evaluation of antibiotic prescribing in general practice using a health insurance company database: penicillins use

General practitioners often prescribe antibiotics for diagnoses that do not require antibiotic treatment, partially because of the fear of treatment failure (and alibism). They are also strongly influenced by patients’ requests, and the empirical use of antibiotics is the main way of infection treatment in general practice in the Czech Republic. All this leads to non-adherence to the clinical recommendations for infections treatment. However, the regular monitoring of total antibiotic consumption does not reveal the critical areas of antibiotic prescription. Therefore, we used the database of a health insurance company to evaluate the antibiotic prescribing habits of general practitioners in an age-stratified population. In this short text, we report our findings on the prescribing of penicillins (Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical group J01C) as an example.