It’s not news that our planet has a serious antibiotic resistance problem on its hands, or that better antibiotic stewardship across the health care spectrum is essential to solving it.
We’ve heard the alarming statistics over and over, but as the crisis grows, they bear repeating:
- Up to 70% of nursing home residents receive antibiotics each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
- Up to 75% of all antibiotics given to them may be inappropriate or unnecessary.
- At least 20% of all adverse drug events in nursing homes are due to antibiotics.
- The C. difficile infection alone affected 453,000 people in 2015, and 29,000 of them died, with billions in associated costs to healthcare facilities.
- No new antibiotic classes have been discovered in the past 30 years, and we’re rapidly running out of weapons.
As a long-term care profession, and particularly as nurses and pharmacists, we’ve been concerned about this for a long time, even before we had that Nov. 28, 2017 Phase 2 Mega-Rule deadline breathing down our necks. It’s a critical cause with implications far beyond paperwork and penalties, one that goes to the heart of what we do and why.
So as facilities scramble to get antibiotic stewardship programs in place, the challenge isn’t so much how to comply with regulatory changes—though that’s obviously important. It’s how to work together as an interdisciplinary team to not only keep our patients safer, but to preserve the effectiveness of these life-saving drugs for future generations.
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