SALT LAKE CITY — The days of your doctor telling you to take 10 days of antibiotics may be over.
Over the past five years, Intermountain Health physicians have become nationally known for their research on antibiotic use. This fall, the health system won two state grants to study antibiotic overuse and how to educate the public and primary care clinicians about it.
“There’s a myth that patients come to the ER for antibiotics, but that’s not the case. They want something that will make them feel better. They’re looking for help relieving their symptoms first.” said Dr. Payal Patel, medical director. Director of Antimicrobial Stewardship at Intermountain Health and co-investigator on this study. She is also an infectious disease physician.
“We already know that in some situations, especially in terms of side effects, five days of antibiotics is more effective than 10 days,” Patel said. “In our work, we also address antibiotic stewardship (ensuring antibiotics are only used when necessary) through all the ways someone can get into our system, often through emergency care. I’m about to sleep.”
Over the past 20 years or a little less, doctors and researchers have come to realize that people are being prescribed antibiotics when they don’t need them. In recent years, Patel and other doctors have found that an estimated 90% of patients given antibiotics for respiratory infections such as laryngitis, tonsillitis, acute ear infections, and bronchitis do not need antibiotics. I realized that.
According to local doctors, cases of death from taking antibiotics when they are not needed are extremely rare. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t serious medical problems from antibiotic overuse, from relatively benign diarrhea to resistance to overprescribed antibiotics and other antibiotics. In other words, taking antibiotics when you don’t need them is affecting, and will affect, your ability to heal from bacterial infections.
There is a myth that patients come to the emergency room for antibiotics. it’s not. They want something that makes them feel good. They first seek help to relieve their symptoms.
– Dr. Payal Patel, Intermountain Health
With the help of a $356,000 grant from Merck, Intermountain Health researchers will study ways to educate patients about when antibiotics are not needed. However, since patients do not prescribe antibiotics themselves, we will also provide technology to doctors to see how the number of antibiotics a patient describes compares to other antibiotics. Intermountain medical officials say the initiative is known to improve practice.
Intermountain is also participating in a $2.5 million project to study the dosage and effectiveness of antibiotics given to children. The project will examine the experiences of children and their families in eight states, including Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, and Idaho. The grant was funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, a nonprofit organization well-known in the medical field that specifically funds research that creates effective change.
The researchers believe that this study is not only informative but also impactful.
“This project is an important starting point that could improve the care of more than 270,000 children with acute respiratory tract infections by accelerating the adoption of evidence-based antibiotic prescribing practices across the system. ” Dr. Raj Srivastava said in a written statement. . He is Intermountain Health’s Chief Clinical Program Officer and leads the project.
“We look forward to the opportunity this initiative provides to continually improve our clinical practice and improve health outcomes, especially for the hundreds of thousands of children in our care.” Srivastava he added.
Two years ago, Intermountain won a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study antibiotic overuse. They were able to determine not only that this practice was occurring, but also that systems needed to be put in place to create significant change. By applying techniques such as creating signage to explain to patients when antibiotics are and are not needed, doctors saw a 15% reduction in the number of prescriptions given for upper respiratory tract infections. I confirmed.
However, this decrease did not persist once the terms of the grant were completed. But all is not lost. With this Merck grant, Patel and other healthcare professionals at Intermountain plan to create a sustainable process based on what they learned from previous grants.
“We’re a group of researchers interested in antibiotic stewardship. We think it’s pretty well known that we’re doing this research. It helps us get grants. I was looking forward to it,” Patel said. “We have a strong reputation for antibiotic stewardship in our field and are happy to address this.”
The key points in this article were generated with the help of an extensive language model and reviewed by our editorial team. The articles themselves are only written by humans.
