Antimicrobial Stewardship with Pharmacist Intervention Improves Timeliness of Antimicrobials Across Thirty-three Hospitals in South Africa

INTRODUCTION: Ensuring timely administration of antimicrobials is critical in the management of patients with infections. Mortality increases by 7.6% for every hour of delay in the administration of antimicrobial therapy in patients with sepsis. The time elapsed from the written antibiotic order to actual intravenous administration or ‘hang-time’ can often be several hours due to logistics within the hospital. Our purpose is to evaluate the change in compliance with administering antimicrobials within an hour of prescription after implementation of a national antibiotic stewardship pharmacist-driven hang-time process improvement protocol. METHODS: This was a prospective multicenter study in 33 South African hospitals from 1 July 2013–30 August 2014. Two pilot sites established the mechanism for noninfectious disease pharmacists to make interventions and document hang-time data. Following this, a hang-time compliance assessment was initiated using the tools of healthcare improvement spread methodology. This consisted of five stages and an implementation toolkit was developed. The pharmacist study coordinator was responsible for implementation, the development of an implementation toolkit and real-time coordination of data with monthly feedback to all sites. RESULTS: A total of 32,985 patients who received intravenous antibiotics were assessed for hang-time compliance with first doses of new antibiotic orders. Over the 60-week period, 21,069 patients received antibiotics within an hour following prescription and were assessed as hang-time compliant. The change in improvement of hang-time compliance following implementation of a pharmacist-driven hang-time process improvement protocol was 41.2% pre-intervention week 1 (164/398) to 78.4% post-intervention week 60 (480/612; P < 0.0001). Pharmacists reviewed and evaluated twice as many patients during the final 4 weeks (1680) compared to the first 4 weeks (834; P < 0.0001). CONCLUSION: Noninfectious disease pharmacists can significantly improve the timely administration of antimicrobials and contribute to low-hanging-fruit antimicrobial stewardship initiatives within a hospital system in a resource-limited country.