In 2015, researchers in China announced they had found for the first time a bacterial gene conferring resistance to colistin. The gene was present in samples from agricultural animals and in 1% of tested patients.1 Colistin, an antibiotic from the 1950s, is rarely prescribed; it is often considered an antibiotic of last resort.
These downloadableposters, available atwww.fighttheresistance.org, encourage antibioticawareness and simple behavior changes.
In May 2016, the U.S. Department of Defense announced this gene, called mcr-1, had been found in E. coli isolated from the urine of a patient in Pennsylvania presenting with symptoms of a urinary tract infection.2 Subsequent surveillance also found mcr-1 E. coli in a pig.
The news has been met with grave concern by public health officials, scientists, infectious disease specialists, and countless physicians around the U.S. It has also served as a reminder that good antibiotic stewardship is a national, if not international, imperative.
“The recent discovery of a plasmid-borne colistin resistance gene, mcr-1, heralds the emergence of truly pan-drug resistant bacteria,” the authors of the recent U.S. study, from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, wrote in their opening sentence.
In November 2015, the Society of Hospital Medicine (SHM) launched an antibiotic stewardship campaign, “Fight the Resistance,” in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Hospitalists around the country have taken the lead on confronting the issue head on.
Eric Howell, MD, MHM
When the CDC and the White House called for action last year, “SHM jumped in with both feet,” says Eric Howell, MD, MHM, SHM’s senior physician advisor, chief of the Division of Hospital Medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview, and professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The “Fight the Resistance” campaign calls for the nation’s 44,000 hospitalists to commit to responsible antibiotic-prescribing practices.
“While it’s extremely alarming, leading up to this, we knew there was a crisis of antibiotic resistance,” says Megan Mack, MD, a hospitalist and clinical instructor in the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor. “We know more antibiotic use is not the answer, stronger is not the answer. We need to be peeling back antibiotic use, honing when we need them, narrowing how we use them as much as possible, and keeping the duration as short as possible.”
Dr. Mack is first author of a new study in the Journal of Hospital Medicine that examines hospitalist-driven antibiotic stewardship efforts in five hospitals around the country.3
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement, with the CDC, recruited Dr. Mack and her study coauthors, hospitalists Jeff Rohde, MD, and Scott Flanders, MD, MHM, to participate.
“We were interested in the opportunity to put into place interventions in five different hospitals and to be able to share our successes and our barriers, which we did twice monthly,” Dr. Mack says.
Each hospital in the collaborative, which included teaching and non-teaching community hospitals and academic medical centers, focused on its own data and tailored its stewardship interventions to three strategies shown to be quality indicators of successful stewardship programs.
These strategies included:
- Enhanced documentation with regard to antimicrobial prescribing and use
- Improved quality and accessibility of guidelines for common infections
- Adoption of a 72-hour antibiotic timeout to reassess a patient’s antibiotic treatment plan once culture results were available
Each hospital used its own particular antibiotic stewardship practice data to educate and inform its physicians, which Dr. Mack says was important to the success of interventions because it was “concrete and realistic.”
The study found that in two hospitals, complete antibiotic documentation in patient records increased to 51% from 4% and to 65% from 8%. It also recorded 726 antibiotic timeouts, resulting in 218 antibiotic treatment adjustments or discontinuations. It also found several barriers to improved antibiotic stewardship.