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Providing antibiotics to immigrants: a qualitative study of general practitioners’ and pharmacists’ experiences

BACKGROUND: If healthcare professionals perceive that patients strongly expect to be prescribed antibiotics, inappropriate prescriptions may result. As it is unknown whether this happens more often with certain patient groups, we explored whether general practitioners (GPs) and pharmacists perceived...

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Autores principales: Lescure, Dominique L. A., van Oorschot, Wilbert, Brouwer, Rob, van der Velden, Janneke, Tjon-A-Tsien, Aimée M. L., Bonnema, Iris V., Verheij, Theo J. M., Richardus, Jan Hendrik, Voeten, Hélène A. C. M.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9058745/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35501699
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12875-022-01706-x
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author Lescure, Dominique L. A.
van Oorschot, Wilbert
Brouwer, Rob
van der Velden, Janneke
Tjon-A-Tsien, Aimée M. L.
Bonnema, Iris V.
Verheij, Theo J. M.
Richardus, Jan Hendrik
Voeten, Hélène A. C. M.
author_facet Lescure, Dominique L. A.
van Oorschot, Wilbert
Brouwer, Rob
van der Velden, Janneke
Tjon-A-Tsien, Aimée M. L.
Bonnema, Iris V.
Verheij, Theo J. M.
Richardus, Jan Hendrik
Voeten, Hélène A. C. M.
author_sort Lescure, Dominique L. A.
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: If healthcare professionals perceive that patients strongly expect to be prescribed antibiotics, inappropriate prescriptions may result. As it is unknown whether this happens more often with certain patient groups, we explored whether general practitioners (GPs) and pharmacists perceived such expectations when they provided antibiotics to immigrant patients. METHODS: Ten GPs and five pharmacists from Rotterdam, the Netherlands, were interviewed on the basis of a semi-structured topic guide. Atlas.ti software was then used to conduct a thematic analysis. RESULTS: GPs felt that immigrant patients, especially those who had arrived recently, were more likely to expect to receive antibiotics than native Dutch patients. However, these expectations had decreased over the last years and did not always lead immigrants to exert pressure on them. Except for language barriers, the factors reported by GPs to influence their antibiotic prescribing behaviour were unrelated to patients’ immigrant background. If there was a language barrier, GPs experienced greater diagnostic uncertainty and needed additional time to obtain and communicate correct information. To overcome language barriers, they often used point-of-care testing to convince patients that antibiotics were unnecessary. Although pharmacists rarely experienced problems dispensing antibiotics to immigrants, they and GPs both struggled to find effective ways of overcoming language barriers, and stressed the need for multi-language support materials. CONCLUSION: While pharmacists rarely experience any problems providing antibiotics to immigrants, GPs regularly face language barriers with immigrant patients, which complicate the diagnostic process and communicating information in the limited available time. This sometimes leads antibiotics to be prescribed inappropriately.
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spelling pubmed-90587452022-05-02 Providing antibiotics to immigrants: a qualitative study of general practitioners’ and pharmacists’ experiences Lescure, Dominique L. A. van Oorschot, Wilbert Brouwer, Rob van der Velden, Janneke Tjon-A-Tsien, Aimée M. L. Bonnema, Iris V. Verheij, Theo J. M. Richardus, Jan Hendrik Voeten, Hélène A. C. M. BMC Prim Care Research BACKGROUND: If healthcare professionals perceive that patients strongly expect to be prescribed antibiotics, inappropriate prescriptions may result. As it is unknown whether this happens more often with certain patient groups, we explored whether general practitioners (GPs) and pharmacists perceived such expectations when they provided antibiotics to immigrant patients. METHODS: Ten GPs and five pharmacists from Rotterdam, the Netherlands, were interviewed on the basis of a semi-structured topic guide. Atlas.ti software was then used to conduct a thematic analysis. RESULTS: GPs felt that immigrant patients, especially those who had arrived recently, were more likely to expect to receive antibiotics than native Dutch patients. However, these expectations had decreased over the last years and did not always lead immigrants to exert pressure on them. Except for language barriers, the factors reported by GPs to influence their antibiotic prescribing behaviour were unrelated to patients’ immigrant background. If there was a language barrier, GPs experienced greater diagnostic uncertainty and needed additional time to obtain and communicate correct information. To overcome language barriers, they often used point-of-care testing to convince patients that antibiotics were unnecessary. Although pharmacists rarely experienced problems dispensing antibiotics to immigrants, they and GPs both struggled to find effective ways of overcoming language barriers, and stressed the need for multi-language support materials. CONCLUSION: While pharmacists rarely experience any problems providing antibiotics to immigrants, GPs regularly face language barriers with immigrant patients, which complicate the diagnostic process and communicating information in the limited available time. This sometimes leads antibiotics to be prescribed inappropriately. BioMed Central 2022-05-02 /pmc/articles/PMC9058745/ /pubmed/35501699 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12875-022-01706-x Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visithttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Lescure, Dominique L. A.
van Oorschot, Wilbert
Brouwer, Rob
van der Velden, Janneke
Tjon-A-Tsien, Aimée M. L.
Bonnema, Iris V.
Verheij, Theo J. M.
Richardus, Jan Hendrik
Voeten, Hélène A. C. M.
Providing antibiotics to immigrants: a qualitative study of general practitioners’ and pharmacists’ experiences
title Providing antibiotics to immigrants: a qualitative study of general practitioners’ and pharmacists’ experiences
title_full Providing antibiotics to immigrants: a qualitative study of general practitioners’ and pharmacists’ experiences
title_fullStr Providing antibiotics to immigrants: a qualitative study of general practitioners’ and pharmacists’ experiences
title_full_unstemmed Providing antibiotics to immigrants: a qualitative study of general practitioners’ and pharmacists’ experiences
title_short Providing antibiotics to immigrants: a qualitative study of general practitioners’ and pharmacists’ experiences
title_sort providing antibiotics to immigrants: a qualitative study of general practitioners’ and pharmacists’ experiences
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9058745/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35501699
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12875-022-01706-x
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