DASON’s primary goals are threefold: 1) to improve quality of patient care, 2) to enhance patient safety, and 3) to promote judicious antimicrobial use for patients treated in community hospitals
DASON pharmacist and Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists (SIDP) President Elizabeth Dodds Ashley is an author on a position paper by several leading healthcare organizations. The paper supports the importance of both infection prevention and antimicrobial stewardship programs and the integral links between both.
“The issues surrounding the prevention and control of infections are intrinsically linked with the issues associated with the use of antimicrobial agents and the proliferation and spread of multidrug-resistant organisms,” says lead author Mary Lou Manning.
In a January 19 issue of the Mountain Xpress, an Asheville, NC newspaper, DASON's Libby Dodds Ashley speaks about antimicrobial stewardship in community hospitals.
“There will always be a need to be sure that we’re doing appropriate antibiotic therapy,” Dodds Ashley says. “Our targets might change based on resistance patterns … and what common infections we’re seeing, but antibiotic stewardship as a concept is here to stay.”
Rebekah Moehring, MD, MPH has been awarded a contract with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study ways to improve antimicrobial use metrics.
The CDC recently developed the Standardized Antimicrobial Administration Ratio (SAAR), a metric used to compare hospital’s antimicrobial use against a national standard. The metric is powered by data that hospitals submit via the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN).
A December 16, 2017 article in the Rocky Mount Telegram highlights the partnership between DASON and Nash UNC Health Care, one of DASON's member facilities. In the article, Nash UNC Health Care pharmacist and antimicrobial stewardship co-chair Luke Heuts talks about the importance of using antibiotics appropriately and only when necessary.
“To further complicate matters, if antibiotics are used when not needed, they won’t help — and the side effects can still be harmful."
The impact of an effective antimicrobial stewardship on patient safety, better patient outcomes, hospital costs, and reducing antimicrobial resistance are enormous.
The resources and support we have received from DASON have allowed us to move projects forward in our antimicrobial stewardship efforts much more quickly and effectively than we could ever have done on our own.
