Relation between general practitioners' prescribing of antibacterial drugs and their use of laboratory tests
BMJ 1996; 313 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.313.7062.922 (Published 12 October 1996) Cite this as: BMJ 1996;313:922
- Michael C Kelsey, consultant microbiologista,
- George A Kouloumas, medical adviser in prescribingb,
- Peter A Lamport, senior chief biomedical scientista,
- Cheryl L Davis, pharmaceutical adviserb
- a Department of Microbiology, Whittington Hospital, London N19 5NF,
- b Camden and Islington Family Health Services Authority, 5th Floor, Insull Wing, London NW1 2LJ
- Correspondence to: Dr Kelsey.
- Accepted 18 April 1996
Only doctors can prescribe antibacterial drugs, and they must take responsibility for prescribing effective, appropriate, safe, and economic drugs. We audited the prescribing habits of general practices and related these to a list of antibiotics selected as first line drugs by a group of general practitioners. Compliance with this list was assumed to represent good practice. General practitioners have unrestricted access to facilities for laboratory testing of suspected infections, and we studied the association between practices achieving a high standard of prescribing antibiotics and their appropriate requests for investigations of children's urinary tract infections and women's genital infections.
Methods and results
Forty one general practitioners attended prescribing forums and formulated a list of first line antibacterial drugs (see footnote of table 1) which they thought would meet all their prescribing requirements not guided by microbiological sensitivity data. In our …