Relation between general practitioners' prescribing of antibacterial drugs and their use of laboratory tests

摘要

Only doctors can prescribe antibacterial drugs, and they must take responsibility for prescribing effective, appropriate, safe, and economic drugs. We audited the prescribing habits of general practices and related these to a list of antibiotics selected as first line drugs by a group of general practitioners. Compliance with this list was assumed to represent good practice. General practitioners have unrestricted access to facilities for laboratory testing of suspected infections, and we studied the association between practices achieving a high standard of prescribing antibiotics and their appropriate requests for investigations of children's urinary tract infections and women's genital infections.