Infectious disease specialist available to discuss the how an aggressive campaign to reduce the unnecessary use of antibiotics can help cut the rate of infection with a dangerous drug-resistant bacterium.
Clostridium difficile, or C.diff, is a bacterium that can cause symptoms ranging from diarrhea to life-threatening inflammation of the colon. The White House just released a massive, five-year plan to combat the severe and deadly threat of “superbugs” — antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It includes cutting back on the unnecessary use of antibiotics.
“The overuse of antibiotics predisposes people to infection with C.diff and other antibiotic-resistant organisms,” said Neil Gaffin, M.D., an infectious disease specialist at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, NJ.
To address the link between the overuse of antibiotics and the rate of C.diff infections, in the spring of 2013 Valley launched an aggressive antibiotic stewardship program to supplement the hospital’s comprehensive environmental disinfection program. Dr. Gaffin’s write-up of Valley’s antibiotic stewardship program will be published in a forthcoming issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, a leading journal in the field of infectious disease.
“The over-arching goal is to increase patient safety by reducing the use of unnecessary antibiotics,” Dr. Gaffin said. “Overuse of antimicrobials causes patient harm mainly by predisposing patients to C.diff infection and contributing significantly to the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria, which can be harder to treat.
“Our antibiotic stewardship programs works in synchrony with our environmental disinfection program by reducing the amount of drug-resistant organisms — the bio burden, if you will — in the hospital,” he said.
“At Valley we are very aggressive about limiting antibiotics, restricting their use as much as possible to those patients who really need them,” Dr. Gaffin said. “As a result, we’ve significantly reduced the indiscriminate use of IV antibiotics and our rate of C.diff has declined.”
“I’m very proud of our program,” Dr. Gaffin said. “No one is monitoring antibiotic use more aggressively than we are here at The Valley Hospital.”
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