Journal of hospital medicine : an official publication of the Society of Hospital Medicine
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Antibiotic stewardship aims to improve patient care and reduce unwanted consequences of antimicrobial overuse or misuse, including lowered efficacy, emergence of antimicrobial resistance, development of secondary infections, adverse drug reactions, increased length of hospital stay, and additional healthcare costs. Recent guidelines make specific recommendations for the development of institutional programs to enhance antimicrobial stewardship. Optimally, such programs should be comprehensive, multidisciplinary, supported by hospital and medical staff leadership, and should employ evidence-based strategies that best fit local needs and resources. ⋯ Intervention goals are to prevent unnecessary antimicrobial starts, to streamline or de-escalate therapy early in its course, and to convert from parenteral to oral therapy, optimize dosing, and ensure the appropriate length of therapy. Most community hospitals, if sufficiently resourced, should be able to implement a successful antimicrobial stewardship program. Evidence suggests that good antimicrobial stewardship can lead to less overall and inappropriate antimicrobial use, lower drug-related costs, reductions in Clostridium difficile-associated disease, and, in some studies, less emergence of antimicrobial resistance.
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Review
Use of pharmacodynamic principles to inform β-lactam dosing: "S" does not always mean success.
Dose optimization is one of the key strategies for enhancing antimicrobial stewardship. There have been tremendous strides in our understanding of antibiotic exposure-response relationships over the past 25 years. For many antibiotics, the "pharmacodynamic" or the exposure variable associated with outcome has been identified. ⋯ Unfortunately, the conventional intermittent β-lactam dosing schemes often used in practice have suboptimal PD profiles. Prolonging the infusion time of β-lactams is one method to maximize the probability of achieving concentrations in excess of the MIC for the majority of the dosing interval, especially against pathogens with elevated MIC values. Prolonged infusions of intravenous β-lactams are not only associated with improved probability of target attainment (PTA) profiles but offer possible cost savings and greater potential for reducing emergence of resistance relative to intermittent infusions.
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Nights and weekends represent a potentially high-risk time for hospitalized patients. Data regarding night or weekend admission and its impact on outcomes is limited. We studied the association between night or weekend admission and outcomes. ⋯ Night or weekend admission was not associated with worse hospitalization-relevant outcomes at our tertiary care hospital.
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Discharge summaries (DS) communicate important clinical information from inpatient to outpatient settings. Previous studies noted increased adverse events and rehospitalization due to poor DS quality. We postulated that an audit and feedback intervention of DS completed by geriatric medicine fellows would improve the completeness of their summaries. ⋯ Fellows were more likely to complete all required DS data after feedback when compared with prior to feedback (91% vs. 71%, P < 0.001). Feedback was also associated with improved admission (93% vs. 70%, P < 0.001), duration of hospitalization (93% vs 78%, P < 0.001), discharge planning (93% vs. 18%, P < 0.02) and postdischarge care (83% vs. 57%., P < 0.001) section-specific information. In conclusion, audit and feedback sessions were associated with better DS completeness in areas of particular importance to geriatric care.