Infection control and hospital epidemiology : the official journal of the Society of Hospital Epidemiologists of America
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Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol · Jul 2006
Inaccurate communications in telephone calls to an antimicrobial stewardship program.
Antimicrobial stewardship programs (ASPs) decrease unnecessary antimicrobial use, decrease antimicrobial resistance, and improve patient outcomes. The effectiveness of a prior approval system--that is, the requirement that approval be obtained from ASP practitioners before certain antimicrobials can be used--depends on the accuracy of the patient data communicated from the primary service. ⋯ A high proportion of ASP calls requesting prior approval included patient data inaccuracies, which have the potential to affect the prescribing of antimicrobials. Although risk factors were identified, these communication errors were common across the different types of ASP interactions. Inaccurate communications may compromise the utility of ASPs that use a prior approval system for optimizing antimicrobial use.
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Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol · Jul 2006
Antibiotic-stewardship practices at top academic centers throughout the United States and at hospitals throughout Massachusetts.
Improvements in antibiotic prescribing to reduce bacterial resistance and control hospital costs is a growing priority, but the way to accomplish this is poorly defined. Our goal was to determine whether certain antibiotic stewardship interventions were universally instituted and accepted at top US academic centers and to document what interventions, if any, are used at both teaching and community hospitals within a geographic area. ⋯ There was great variability among the approaches to the oversight of antibiotic prescribing at major academic hospitals. Antibiotic management interventions were lacking in more than half of the Massachusetts community hospitals surveyed. More research is needed to define the best antibiotic stewardship interventions for different hospital settings.
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Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol · Jul 2006
Hospital-acquired pneumonia in the intensive care units of Polish hospitals.
We analyzed the epidemiological characteristics of pneumonia in intensive care units of Polish hospitals. Among 11,587 patients, there were 191 cases of hospital-acquired pneumonia (HAP). ⋯ The overall mortality rate was 12.6%, and the mortality rate for patients who received artificial ventilation was 15.0%. The predominant organisms causing HAP and VAP were Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Escherichia coli, and 21.1% of Staphylococcus aureus isolates were resistant to methicillin.