Current Practices in Antimicrobial Stewardship

Krutika Mediwala, PharmD, BCPS, explains current best practices for health systems in antimicrobial stewardship. This video was filmed at the 2019 ASHP 54th Midyear Clinical Meeting & Exhibition in Las Vegas.

Krutika Mediwala, PharmD, BCPS: Current practices in antimicrobial stewardship is a very booming field. I feel like we just catch up, and then there’s something new that’s come up. Around 5 years ago, I would say, or a little more than that, we started the in-patient stewardship program, and that’s taken off. I was just in a recent presentation that said that up to 85% of institutions in the nation are reporting that they have stewardship programs, which is really good from the past years. So, everyone’s catching up.

But like I said, just when we think that we’re good, we have just a little more to go. So, the new buzzword for antimicrobial stewardship is the 'outpatient stewardship' aspect of it. There’s a lot of practices that we do on the inpatient side that have been shown to accurately affect length of stay, antimicrobial use, and ultimately, patient outcomes and optimizing that. But what we’ve been not able to touch a whole lot on, is the outpatient realm of things as well as the less-talked about things, such as nursing homes and other sites as well—long term care facilities—just because inpatient hospitals are a little more problem[atic] than the others.