Antimicrobial stewardship
Patient Safety
Definition. Antimicrobial stewardship is a coordinated programme that promotes the appropriate use of antimicrobials to improve patient outcomes and reduce resistance and adverse effects.
Explanation
Programmes are led by infectious disease specialists and pharmacists and use interventions such as prospective audit and feedback, restriction of selected agents, guidelines, intravenous-to-oral switch and review of treatment duration (Dellit et al., 2007).
A Cochrane review found that interventions to improve prescribing in hospital inpatients increase guideline-concordant treatment and shorten antibiotic courses without increasing mortality (Davey et al., 2017). Enabling interventions, such as education and feedback, tend to be more sustainable than restriction alone.
Related concepts
Clinical pathway Quality improvement
Read on The Health Topics
- Implementation Science: Conceptual Framework, Measurement Taxonomy and Causal Chain Analysis
- WhatsApp and Patient Safety: An Academic Discussion Based on a Corpus Compiled from Two Databases
- Ecotherapy and Health Outcomes: A Chronological Evidence Mapping of Conceptual Evolution and Outcome Diversification, 1980–2026
- SPAARTA: Policy Analysis for Antimicrobial Resistance
- Reducing Surgical Infections and Optimizing Antibiotics
- Understanding Antimicrobial Resistance: A Sociological Perspective
References
Davey, P., Marwick, C. A., Scott, C. L., Charani, E., McNeil, K., Brown, E., Gould, I. M., Ramsay, C. R., & Michie, S. (2017). Interventions to improve antibiotic prescribing practices for hospital inpatients. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, (2), CD003543.
Dellit, T. H., Owens, R. C., McGowan, J. E., Gerding, D. N., Weinstein, R. A., Burke, J. P., et al. (2007). Infectious Diseases Society of America and the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America guidelines for developing an institutional program to enhance antimicrobial stewardship. Clinical Infectious Diseases, 44(2), 159–177.
Cite this entry: Kurutkan, M. N. (2026). Antimicrobial stewardship. In The Health Topics glossary. https://healthtopic.org/glossary/antimicrobial-stewardship/
Articles that discuss this concept
4 articles on The Health Topics use this concept. The list updates as new articles are published.
- Reducing Surgical Infections and Optimizing Antibiotics 1
- SPAARTA: Policy Analysis for Antimicrobial Resistance 1
- WhatsApp and Patient Safety: An Academic Discussion Based on a Corpus Compiled from Two Databases 1
- Implementation Science: Conceptual Framework, Measurement Taxonomy and Causal Chain Analysis 1