Review of antibiotic prescriptions as part of antimicrobial stewardship programmes: results from a pilot implementation at two provincial-level hospitals in Viet Nam

OBJECTIVES: To investigate the feasibility of retrospective prescription-based review and to describe the antibiotic prescribing patterns to provide information for an antimicrobial stewardship programme in Viet Nam METHODS: This study was conducted in two provincial-level hospitals between February and April 2020. Reviews were done by a clinical team consisting of leaders/senior doctors of each ward to assess the optimal level (optimal/adequate/suboptimal/inadequate/not assessable) of antibiotic prescriptions. Mixed-effect logistic regression at prescription level was used to explore factors associated with optimal antibiotic use. RESULTS: The retrospective prescription-based review was accepted by study clinical wards with varied levels of participants. One hundred and eighty-three patients (326 prescriptions) in Hospital 1 and 200 patients (344 prescriptions) in Hospital 2 were included. One hundred and nineteen of the 326 (36.5%) antibiotic prescriptions in Hospital 1 and 51/344 (14.8%) antibiotic prescriptions in Hospital 2 were determined to be optimal by the review teams. The number of adequate antibiotic prescriptions were 179/326 (54.9%) and 178 (51.7%) in Hospital 1 and Hospital 2, respectively. The optimal level was lower for surgical prophylaxis antibiotics than for empirical therapy (OR = 0.06; 95% CI 0.01–0.45), higher in prescriptions in the ICU (OR = 12.00; 95% CI 3.52–40.92), higher in definitive antibiotic therapy (OR = 48.12; 95% CI 7.17–322.57) and higher in those with an indication recorded in medical records (OR = 3.46; 95% CI 1.13–10.62). CONCLUSIONS: This study provides evidence on the feasibility of retrospective prescription-based review, with adaption to the local situation. High and varying levels of optimal antibiotic prescriptions in clinical wards in hospitals were observed in Viet Nam.