Dive Brief:
- Hospital physicians are putting patients at risk by overusing antibiotics, and they need to act now to prevent the emergence of resistant bacterial strains, the CDC said this week.
- According to CDC research, about half of hospitalized patients get antibiotics during their stay, which isn't unexpected.
- What is surprising is that doctors in some hospitals prescribed three times as many antibiotics as others, though the patients were being cared for in similar areas of each hospital, said agency director Tom Frieden, MD, at a news conference.
Dive Insight:
We've clearly got a public health problem of substantial proportions when physicians are varying that widely in their antibiotic use. Hospitals may need to do self checks to see where they're at with antibiotic use, and physicians whose prescribing patterns are far outside the norm should be identified. The payoff for such vigilance could be significant: If hospitals could reduce the use of antibiotics by just 30%, they could see a 26% reduction in C.diff. infections, the CDC notes.