Appropriate antimicrobial agent usage: the beginning of a journey

This study aimed to describe the pattern of antimicrobial agent usage in a general tertiary care hospital in Rio de Janeiro. Some prescriptions were evaluated for its therapeutic indication, dose, route of administration, and duration of treatment based on Antimicrobial Application Sheets and daily medical prescriptions. Consumption was expressed by using Defined Daily Dose per 100 bed-days. Within the 20,182 validated prescriptions, 9,356 were eligible for the study. The first-choice therapy was prescribed 6,175 (66.01%) times. It was verified that 5,455 (58.31%) of the prescribed antimicrobial agents were associated with bacteriologic culture tests, and among 2,484 (45.54%) of such cultures, at least one microorganism was identified. Negative results were obtained in 2,971 (54.46%) processed cultures, in which 1,289 patients (43.49%) had already initiated antimicrobial therapy. From patients with negative cultures, 518 (33.99%) prescriptions had alternative treatments, and from these, 495 (95.96%) could have been changed. Therefore, de-escalation of antimicrobial therapy has not been a practice in the institution. Among prescriptions that needed renal function dose adjustments, this was performed in 81.11%. In general, prescriptions were adjusted for dose (70.03%), route of administration (99.63%) and duration of treatment (74.70%). Piperacillin/tazobactam was the mostly used antimicrobial (3,923 DDD/100 bed-days).