OLOF CRONBERG - Diagnosis-linked antibiotic prescribing for infections in primary care

Project description

Antimicrobial resistance is a global public health problem. Although a reduced use of antibiotics in primary care in Sweden, there are still large variations in investigation and treatment, which indicates that the management is not optimal.

The main aims with the project are to investigate how prescribers in primary care manage various infections and how the management has varied over time, to study what characterizes the prescribers who change their behaviour and to explore why prescribers sometimes perceive difficulties to follow guidelines.

The project is based on registry data extracted from electronic health records in Region Kronoberg with detailed data on visits, patients, prescribers, investigations and antibiotic treatments. Descriptive and analytic statistics will be presented. Multilevel analysis will be used to analyse the degree of explanation of antibiotic prescription for diagnosis, patient, physician, primary healthcare centre and possibly other factors. Causes of low adherence to guidelines will be analysed through a qualitative interview study.

The goal is to find causes of the large variations in investigation and treatment of infections, in order to be able to propose possible interventions to optimize the management. In turn, this could lead to more equal care and also to reduced antibiotic resistance.