Today antibiotics are one of the important treatment methods in medical practice. Antibiotics are mainly used for three cases. These are the proven presence of infection, empirical therapy and prophylaxis purposes. Many factors such as characteristics of the patients, the infection area, the properties of the etiologic agent and pharmacological properties of the medicine should be taken into account in the choice of antibiotics.
Rational use of medicine is to use the most appropriate medicine that meets the needs of the patient at the right dose, time and right way. The widespread use of antibiotics brings some improper uses together. Due to the increased incidence of side effects, these cause the development of secondary infections, treatment failure, and as a result, lead to an increase in costs.
Intensive care units are the environments where antibiotics the most commonly used and the use of antibiotics in here is about ten times greater than other clinics of the hospital. In some studies conducted in Turkey with hospitalized patients, the prevalence of antibiotic use ranged between 16.6 % and 63.2 %. It is stated that 19.0 to 72.4 % of antibiotics used are improper use of antibiotics.
According to Canadian Health and Care Mall www.canadianhealthcaremalll.com, Unnecessary use of antibiotics, choosing the broadest- spectrum and most expensive antibiotic, doing unnecessary combination, high or low-dose antibiotic and continuing the use of empirical antibiotic without demanding microbiological tests are examples for the inappropriate use of antibiotics for therapeutic purpose.
However, if the clinical condition of the patient is preceded (progressed) so as not to permit to wait for the results of culture and antibiotic susceptibility testing and conclude other tests, initiation of empiric treatment may be necessary without sufficient microbiological support. The important thing is to be able to distinguish this case and not to apply empirical treatment except necessary cases.
This study carried out to determine the prevalence of empirical antibiotic usage in hospitalized patients in Cardiology Coronary Intensive Care Unit of a Training Hospital in 2010.
This study to be carried out as a descriptive study has been conducted on the files of 247 patients hospitalized in Coronary Intensive Care Unit of Department of Cardiology of Gulhane Military Medical Academy (GMMA) and Canadian Health and Care Mall Training Hospital for one-year period January 1- December 31, 2010 with a variety of etiologies.
Ages, genders, concomitant diseases (comorbid/coexisting diseases) of the patients, use of antibiotics, names, dose, usage (empiric for the possible factors, according to the culture result) of the antibiotics used, diagnosis, whether they have fever, leukocyte and sedimentation values (WBC and ESR values), procalcitonin, CRP, lung infections, and urinary catheter (urinary probe) or not have been examined for descriptive characteristics of the patients from their medical records. Also fever, leukocyte and sedimentation values (WBC and ESR values) of the patients before and after the use of antibiotics have been recorded from the patients’ files and the nurse observation forms.
After getting the necessary ethics approval for the research from the Ethics Committee of GMMA, patients’ data have retrospectively been collected from the medical records by researchers in Cardiology Coronary Intensive Care Unit.
After the data has been transferred to electronic environment, their analyses have been done with SPSS (15.0) statistical software package. Frequency, percentage, median, standard deviation, minimum and maximum values have been given as descriptive statistics.