Abstract
Overuse and inappropriate antibiotic prescription for respiratory tract infections (RTI) are one of the major contributors to the current antibiotic resistance problem. Guidelines provide support to prescribers for proper decision-making. Our purpose is to review the impact of prescribers’ exposure to guidelines in antibiotic prescription for RTIs. A systematic review was performed searching in the scientific databases MEDLINE PubMed and EMBASE for studies which exposed prescribers to guidelines for RTI and compared antibiotic prescription rates/quality before and after the implementation, with thirty-four articles included in the review. The selected studies consisted on a simple intervention in the form of guideline implementation while others involved multifaceted interventions, and varied in population, designs, and settings. Prescription rate was shown to be reduced in the majority of the studies, along with an improvement in appropriateness, defined mainly by the prescription of narrow-spectrum rather than broad-spectrum antibiotics. Intending to ascertain if this implementation could decrease prescription costs, 7 articles accessed it, of which 6 showed the intended reduction. Overall interventions to improve guidelines adherence can be effective in reducing antibiotic prescriptions and inappropriate antibiotic selection for RTIs, supporting the importance of implementing guidelines in order to decrease the high levels of antibiotic prescriptions, and consequently reduce antimicrobial resistance.
Highlights
Antibiotic resistance is an important public health issue and one of the World Health Organization’s [WHO] highest priorities [1]
From the analysis of their full text, 435 articles were excluded, and 34 studies were included in this systematic review [25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58]
In order to identify studies addressing the impact of guidelines adherence in the rate of antibiotic prescription for respiratory infections, the following search terms were used on the scientific databases
Summary
Antibiotic resistance is an important public health issue and one of the World Health Organization’s [WHO] highest priorities [1]. As a consequence of the growing levels of antibiotic resistance, higher patient morbidity and mortality rates have been registered, along with an increase in healthcare expenditure. In Europe, it is estimated that multidrug-resistant bacteria are annually responsible for 25,000 deaths and 1.5 billion euros spent in extra healthcare costs and productivity losses. If measures are not taken to reverse current resistance rates, it is expected that by 2050, 2.9 trillion USD will be spent in cumulative losses in OECD Co-operation and Development) countries and that 10 million deaths will occur per year. Of this value, Europe is expected to have 392k deaths and Asia and Africa to be the continents with the highest number (4.7M and 4.1M, respectively) [4]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
