Educating

Culture and susceptibility data can be an important tool supporting antimicrobial decision-making. Population data, when collected from the right population, can support empirical choices. More importantly, the data from a well-collected patient sample is a window of opportunity. But like any tool, if not used correctly, it won’t work for you. This session will explain what the numbers mean—and don’t mean.

Antimicrobial dosing regimens have largely been empirically based unless supported by pharmacodynamic statistics. The minimum inhibitory concentration is the first step, but the dosing should be modified when indicated to adjust for patient, host, and drug factors. This session will cover those influences and how doses might be impacted.

Microbiota: there are bad bugs and good bugs. Sadly, antimicrobials do not know the difference. This session will support the importance of the first D of antimicrobial stewardship, “de-escalation,” by focusing on the role antimicrobials have in causing resistance but also upsetting the critically important balanced.

Perhaps antimicrobial stewardship is most important when dealing with the most common infections: pyometra, urinary tract infections, and pyoderma, which can present simple or complicated. This session will build on the previous three sessions to delineate approaches of accomplishing antimicrobial stewardship principles, but not at the cost of therapeutic success.