Antibiotics are overprescribed or inappropriately prescribed between 30 and 50 percent of the time, according to a recent study, but the implementation of antibiotic stewardship programs in hospital settings can reduce costs and antimicrobial consumption significantly.
Growing antibiotic resistance has been noted as an increasing health threat by the United Nations and could lead to 10 million deaths worldwide by 2050. The challenges of antibiotic resistance are what prompted researchers to look at the effectiveness antibiotic stewardship programs can have.
The study, published in Nature, looked at consumption, cost and antibiogram patterns in 2,367 patients who took at least one targeted antibiotic — meropenem, colistin or tigecycline — during their hospital stay. Results were tracked over the course of 20 months at An-Najah National University Hospital in Palestine for both pre- and post-implementation of antibiotic stewardship programs.
The hospital's stewardship program included regular rounds by an infectious disease specialist and an infectious disease pharmacist, who were also available for consultation during off-hours. The hospital also put a pre-authorization process in place for several restricted antibiotics, except in cases of emergency.
Researchers found not only that there were increases in bacterial susceptibility to several of the drugs after the stewardship program was implemented, cost savings were also identified.
"The program's benefits were observed not only in the clinical aspect but also in the financial aspect, where the mean cost of selected antimicrobials was significantly reduced by 55.5 percent in the post-[antibiotic stewardship program] phase," researchers wrote.
As a result, researchers recommend adoption of antibiotic stewardship programs and that hospitals continue to "closely follow its impacts, and adjust interventions accordingly to combat antimicrobial resistance and preserve last-line therapeutic regimens."