Major articleAntibiotic use in Vietnamese hospitals: A multicenter point-prevalence study
Section snippets
Setting
Vietnam has 3 levels of hospitals: national (39 general and specialized hospitals), provincial (394 general and specialized hospitals), and district (640 general hospitals). To avoid intrinsic differences among participating hospitals, we included only general hospitals in this study. A list of general hospitals providing medical and surgical services and had an infection control team was obtained from the Vietnamese Ministry of Health and used as a sampling frame. The study protocol was then
Patient demographics
A total of 7,571 inpatients were surveyed in 36 hospitals (2 national level, 18 provincial level, and 16 district level), including 3,803 males (50.2%) and 3,768 females (49.8%), with a mean age of 42.3 ± 23.8 years (age range, 2-96 years). There were 4,105 (54.2%) patients on medical wards, 1,910 (25.2%) patients on surgical wards, 694 (9.2%) on pediatric wards, 508 (6.7%) on obstetrics and gynecology wards, and 354 (4.7%) in intensive care units. The majority of the patients surveyed were
Discussion
We found that a large number (67.4%) of hospitalized patients received antibiotics and that 30.8% of those antibiotics were considered inappropriately indicated. The prevalence of antibiotic prescription in this study is similar to that reported in previous studies in developing countries. Those studies focused mainly on the prevalence of antibiotic use, which ranged from 62.8% to 77.8%.8, 16 However, our rate is higher than the prevalence reported in previous studies conducted in European
Acknowledgment
We thank the infection control teams from the participating hospitals and the nonprofit Epidemiological and Clinical Research Information Network (ECRIN), which contributed to the data collection and management of this study.
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Supported by research funds from the Vietnamese Ministry of Health.
Conflict of interest: None to report.