First name
Anna
Middle name
C
Last name
Sick-Samuels

Title

Association of a blood culture utilization intervention on antibiotic use in a pediatric intensive care unit.

Year of Publication

2019

Number of Pages

482-484

Date Published

2019 04

ISSN Number

1559-6834

Abstract

<p>Blood cultures are essential for the evaluation of sepsis. However, they may sometimes be obtained inappropriately, leading to high false-positive rates, largely due to contamination.1 As a quality improvement project, clinician decision-support tools for evaluating patients with fever or signs and symptoms of sepsis were implemented in April 2014 in our pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). This initiative resulted in a 46% decrease in blood culture obtainment2 and has been replicated in other institutions.3 It is important to evaluate antibiotic use as a balancing measure because a reduction in blood cultures could lead to an increase in antibiotic treatment days if clinicians continued empiric treatment in scenarios when blood culture results were not available. The objective of this study was to evaluate whether antibiotic use in the PICU changed in association with a reduction in blood culture utilization.</p>

DOI

10.1017/ice.2019.10

Alternate Title

Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol

PMID

30767809

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