When do general practitioners request urine specimens for microbiology analysis? The applicability of antibiotic resistance surveillance based on routinely collected data

摘要

Objectives: We do not know how representative reported levels of resistance to antibiotics in urinary tract infections (UTIs) are as there is wide variation in the rate of urine specimens submitted to microbiology laboratories by general practices. We used a questionnaire to investigate variation in sampling for patients with suspected UTI to explore any systematic bias that may influence interpretation of surveillance data based on routine data.