Slide Show: Antibiotic Prescribing Practices

A new Vital Signs report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that clinicians in some hospitals prescribe three times as many antibiotics than clinicians in other hospitals, even though patients were receiving care in similar areas of each hospital. In addition, about one-third of the time, prescribing practices to treat urinary tract infections and prescriptions for the critical and common drug vancomycin included a potential error – given without proper testing or evaluation, or given for too long.