Antimicrobial Stewardship: From Bedside to Theory. Thirteen Examples of Old and More Recent Strategies from Everyday Clinical Practice

Abstract

“Antimicrobial stewardship” is a strategy that promotes the responsible use of antimicrobials. The objective of this paper is to focus on consolidated and more recent improvements in clinical strategies that should be adopted in hospitalized patients to ameliorate their infectious diseases’ outcome and to reduce the antibiotic resistance risk through judicious use of antibiotics. We present 13 common clinical scenarios, the respective suggested interventions and the explanations of the supporting evidence, in order to help clinicians in their decision-making process. Strategies including the choice of antibiotic and dose optimization, antibiotic spectrum narrowing (de-escalation), shortening of duration, shift to oral route or outpatient parenteral antibiotic (including elastomeric pumps), and biomarkers are described and discussed.

Keywords

• antimicrobial stewardship
• anti-bacterial agents
• outpatients
• antibiotic optimization
• antibiotic policy