Background, Rationale and Suggested Implementation Strategies
- The workgroup will likely be a new subgroup of your antimicrobial stewardship team.
- For maximum impact, the workgroup should consist of a multidisciplinary team that includes (but is not limited to) key stakeholders, such as a Hospitalists, Infectious Diseases physicians and/or pharmacists, Emergency Medicine physicians, house officers, IT personnel, microbiology lab representatives, and nursing.
- Designate an internal lead for urinary tract infection (UTI) and pneumonia antibiotic-related quality improvement efforts. This person is responsible for ensuring implementation of interventions recommended by the workgroup, as well as identifying barriers and troubleshooting during implementation.
- Meet quarterly to review data, define problem areas, identify underlying causes of problem areas and determine interventions for improvement.
- Communicate work to local leadership to ensure institutional buy-in.
- Engage key stakeholders in the design of interventions to encourage provider buy-in.
- When implementing interventions, consider using behavioral economic principles or social psychology to provide additional cultural incentives to change: in other words, make the right thing easier (e.g., automatic) and the wrong thing harder (e.g., removing from order sets).
- Implement at least two new interventions per year.
- Assess post-intervention data for success or failure of intervention, and make modifications as needed.
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