The Consumption Of Antibiotics, An Indicator Of The Level Of Economic Development. Prophylaxis Of Postoperative Infections

The inappropriate use of antibiotics is a problem that needs a global solution. The World Health Organization issued a strategy and related guidelines to help countries in setting up systems to monitor the antibiotic usage and to implement efficient actions, such as insuring that antibiotics can only be purchased with prescription. While people still die in developing countries because they lack the correct antibiotic treatment, antibiotic overuse in other countries concern as much. In a study conducted in 2012 in 10 hospitals in Romania, resulted an excessive use of antibiotic prophylaxis (about half the time using perioperative antibiotic prophylaxis) and inadequate prophylaxis (over 70% of all antibiotic prophylaxis recorded in the same study indicates a duration of at least 3 days to a maximum recommended duration of 24 hours; sometimes the usage of an inappropriate antibiotic develops a resistance profile to the microbial flora present). We analysed the consumption of antibiotics in sections of adults of surgical departments of Emergency County Hospital Oradea (general surgery, neurosurgery, orthopaedics, urology, ophthalmology, obstetrics and gynaecology, microsurgery, maxillofacial surgery, thoracic surgery, vascular surgery and otorhinolaryngology), during 2014. The results indicate that about 91% of surgical patients were treated with antibiotics, in 26% of cases the type of antibiotics being changed and the costs of antibiotics represented about 73% of total costs of drugs. The infection prevalence was nearly 16%, and the average length of administration was 5.21 days. The antibiotic prophylaxis guidelines are a good tool to reduce the incidence of postoperative infections and medication costs.