Patient Safety Week 2014 – CTCPS highlights Antibiotics and their Overuse

It is Patient Safety Week, and we would like to highlight a medical concern that we are actively working on:  Infections and the overuse of antibiotics.

According to the CDC, “every day, about 1 in every 20 hospitalized patients has an infection caused by receiving medical care.  In 2010, 31.3% of patients who acquired a healthcare associated infections were readmitted within 30 days for an infection or complication.”

According to a recent announcement by Tom Frieden at the CDC, there is enormous variability in the rate at which antibiotics are prescribed from one hospital to the next – as much as three-fold!  This leads to the conclusion that even a small reduction in the amount of overprescribing will have a significant impact in reducing the number of infections, super-infections and C. difficile.  Shortly after the announcement, the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America noted that routine overuse of antibiotics puts patients in harm’s way.

At CTCPS, we are working to bring about changes in the way that antibiotics are prescribed, following these findings, so that patients will not leave the hospital with more problems than they entered with.