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A Recommended Collaborative Approach

George W. Counts, MD

JAMA. 1977;238(20):2170-2172.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

THE 1976 Hospital Accreditation Standards on Infection Control established by the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH) now requires involvement of physicians in a review of antimicrobial usage in hospitalized patients. As stated, the hospital's infection control program is to "include the regular review of the clinical usage of antibiotics."

In recent years, attention has been focused on antibiotic prescribing and the magnitude of the problem of inappropriate usage of antibiotics by physicians. Several factors have contributed to the call for scrutiny of physician antibiotic-prescribing patterns. In 1970, Scheckler and Bennett¹ from the Center for Disease Control reported that 62% of patients receiving antibiotics in seven community hospitals had no evidence of infection. Similar findings concerning possible inappropriate use of antibiotics have been reported by others.^2-4 In 1974, Simmons and Stolley⁵ presented a strongly worded commentary on physician misuse of antibiotics. They suggested that "hundreds . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From the Division of Infectious Diseases, Harborview Medical Center, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle.

Footnotes
Read in part before the annual meeting of the Association for Practitioners in Infectious Control, Hollywood, Fla, April 5, 1977.

Reprint requests to Division of Infectious Diseases, Harborview Medical Center, 325 Ninth Ave, Seattle, WA 98104 (Dr Counts).

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