Medical community focuses on overuse of antibiotics
A CDC infectious disease doctor prompts hospitals to create antibiotic stewardship programs to track usage.
With antibiotic usage growing at a rampant rate in U.S. and world hospitals, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working to educate people on the dangers of overuse.
Dr. Arjun Srinivasan spoke to Redmond Regional Medical Center personnel Wednesday about the importance of U.S. hospitals establishing an antibiotic stewardship program.
“This is a global issue,” said Srinivasan, an infectious disease doctor who works with the CDC.
A stewardship program will help hospitals, clinics and private primary care doctors keep up with antibiotic usage, Srinivasan added. An antibiotic is a medicine used to fight bacterial infections.
“We know that a lot of antibiotic use is unnecessary,” Srinivasan said, adding that it is an old medical idea that antibiotic use could only help and not hurt.
Overuse of antibiotics can lead to more resistant infections and even the creation of new infections, Srinivasan continued.
In 2008, over 142,000 visits to hospitals’ emergency departments were attributed to the adverse effect of a person being assigned too many antibiotics, the wrong kind of antibiotics or being on an antibiotic for too long, Srinivasan said.
Clostridium difficile, or C. diff., is one of the most common infections caused by overuse of antibiotics, he added.
Allen Gandhi, Redmond’s clinical pharmacy manager, said C. diff. is an infection in the stomach
caused by having too much antibiotics in the system. The infection kills good bacteria and causes an overgrowth of bad bacteria, he added.
The Joint Commission, a nationally accredited body for the medical profession, will require all hospitals to have their antibiotic stewardship program accredited as of early 2017, Srinivasan said.
Not only should a stewardship program educate physicians about antibiotic use, but it should also educate patients in an effort to dispel the myth that antibiotics should always be used, he continued.
In many cases, infections don’t need to be treated by antibiotics, specifically in cases of colds, Srinivasan said. If
4,000 individuals came into a hospital with a cold and weren’t treated with an antibiotic, only one individual would potentially have their cold turn into the flu, he added.
Redmond has had a stewardship program in place for years, Gandhi said. His clinical pharmacists review the prescriptions hospital patients are using every day, while also educating medical staff on recent studies about antibiotics.
Floyd Medical Center Clinical Pharmacy Coordinator Gary Latta said FMC has a team in place working to develop a policy that addresses all of the Joint Commission requirements.
His hospital is also installing software that will help monitor each patient’s antibiotic use.