A study of European emergency departments has found that antibiotic prescribing for children who show up with a fever varies widely across the continent, and many of those children are discharged with a broad-spectrum antibiotic. The findings appeared in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
The cross-sectional, observational analysis of more than 5,100 children admitted to 28 emergency departments in 11 countries across Europe over a 16-month period found that about a third of the children who presented with a fever but no other illnesses received an antibiotic on discharge, with the prescribing frequency ranging from 19% in Switzerland to 64% in Turkey. More than 60% of those prescriptions, which were written mainly for respiratory tract infections, were for second-line antibiotics.
The authors say the findings indicate a significant amount of overprescribing is occurring, particularly in children with respiratory infections, and that the drivers of this inappropriate prescribing need to be identified and addressed at the hospital and national level.
When the researchers looked at the type of infections for which antibiotics were prescribed in children without comorbidities, they found that respiratory tract infections (upper and lower) accounted for 83% (1,208 of 1,454) of all prescriptions
The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) has the article.
