International Infection Prevention Week October 15th – October 21st 2017

International Infection Prevention Week aims to focus on this problem, and provide actions that patients, healthcare providers, and others can take to reduce the threat of antibiotic resistance.

It is becoming well known that antibiotic resistance is greatly increased through the overuse and misuse of antibiotics. According to a 2017 report from the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, bacterial infections that were once able to be cured with antibiotics are now becoming increasingly difficult to treat. In 2015 alone, over 30 million prescriptions for antimicrobials were dispensed in the Australian community. That is a huge number of prescriptions for our population of only 24 million. On any given day in an Australian hospital, 40.5% of patients were being administered an antimicrobial. Of these, 23.3% of antimicrobial prescriptions were noncompliant with guidelines, and 21.9% were considered inappropriate.

The bad news is, all of this information is scary but true. The good news, you can help!

Antibiotic resistance can be prevented by;

• Regular Hand Hygiene
• Local infection control procedures that minimize spread of these bacteria in hospitals
• Good personal hygiene minimizes spread of these bacteria in the community.
• Careful prescribing of antibiotics that will minimize the development of more antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria.