Pediatric antibiotic stewardship programs (ASPs) in hospital and outpatient settings optimize the use of antibiotics to improve clinical outcomes, decrease adverse drug events, and reduce the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria. However, stewardship for patients at the transition from hospital discharge to home, or ?discharge stewardship,? is an unmet need for several reasons. First, few pediatric stewardship programs perform discharge stewardship. Second, approximately 30% of pediatric patients receive antibiotics at hospital discharge. Third, the majority of antibiotic days prescribed for hospitalized patients occur after discharge. Fourth, up to half of discharge antibiotic prescriptions are suboptimal, which includes choosing the wrong drug, dose, route, or duration of therapy. This project will use an implementation science framework to develop, implement, and test the effectiveness of a multifaceted discharge stewardship intervention for hospitalized children with the three most common indications for antibiotic prescribing in hospitalized children - community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), urinary tract infections (UTI), and skin/soft tissue infections (SSTI) - at four children's hospitals to establish a foundation for future expansion to additional target populations. Antibiotic choice, dose, route, and duration of therapy will be addressed.
Aim 1 is to develop, locally adapt, and implement a discharge stewardship intervention across the four participating sites. The integrated Promoting Action on Research Implementation in Health Services (i-PARIHS) framework will guide a rapid formative evaluation to identify contextual factors likely to facilitate or hinder the implementation of a discharge stewardship intervention at each site. Based on these results, local facilitators will work to develop and implement a discharge stewardship intervention comprised of consensus driven clinical prescribing guidelines for CAP, UTI, and SSTI plus quarterly feedback of prescribing data based on these guidelines.
Aim 2 is to measure the impact of the discharge stewardship intervention on antibiotic prescribing (the primary outcome) and patient-centered balancing measures. For the primary outcome, suboptimal antibiotic prescribing, we will use retrospective data collection leveraging validated diagnostic code-based algorithms to maximize consistency and feasibility for future dissemination. For the balancing metrics, treatment failure and post- discharge adverse drug events, we will use prospective data collection from parents of patients with CAP, UTI, and SSTI to maximize their capture. Both sub-aims will utilize a time series analysis based on 18 months of pre-intervention data followed by 30 months of post-intervention data. This project will form the foundation for future dissemination of discharge stewardship to a broader array of patient populations. Investigators on this proposal form the leadership of the Sharing Antimicrobial Reports for Pediatric Stewardship (SHARPS) Collaborative, a network comprised of more than 60 children's hospitals across North America that is uniquely positioned to adopt antimicrobial stewardship interventions designed to target prescribing at hospital discharge.
Antibiotic stewardship programs optimize the use of antibiotics to improve clinical outcomes, decrease adverse drug events, and reduce the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria, but typically neglect prescribing at the transition from hospital discharge to home. We will utilize an implementation science framework to develop, implement, and test the effectiveness of a multifaceted discharge stewardship intervention for hospitalized children with pneumonia, urinary tract infections, or skin/soft tissue infections across four hospitals. This will establish a foundation for future expansion of discharge stewardship to additional target populations.
