Antimicrobial Stewardship: It Takes a Village

摘要

More than a decade ago, it became clear that antimicrobial stewardship programs (ASPs) are essential to optimize antibiotic use in health care and to improve patient outcomes, and that they have the additional benefit of reducing health care costs. Many reports on effective antimicrobial stewardship (AS) interventions in the acute care setting exist; however, much of this work has been done in single academic centers within the traditional top-down stewardship models in which stewardship physicians and pharmacists provide recommendations to frontline staff regarding antibiotic use. Studies addressing implementation of AS in large or heterogeneous health care systems are limited, as are studies evaluating the role of nonphysician, nonpharmacist providers in AS. In this issue of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, studies describe incorporating bedside nurses into AS and infection prevention (Ha et al.) and expanding AS within a diverse heath care system (Logan et al.).