Teams have been collecting baseline data on all infants administered antibiotics for the past few months and getting ready to attend the January 10th kickoff meeting. Current enrollment in North Carolina stands at 37 teams with more teams joining. PQCNC can estimate out of the 120,000 births that occur annually in North Carolina, we will impact approximately 50% of those births throughout this initiative. With a conservative range of 6-10% of those infants receiving prophylactic treatment for sepsis, the current rate of exposure to antibiotics in the state is 3600-6000 infants annually.
With an aim of reducing exposure and duration of antibiotics by 20%, PQCNC and quality improvement teams across the state will protect 720 – 1200 infants from unnecessary exposure to antimicrobials with improvement efforts.
As Dr. Srinivasan, the Associate Director for Healthcare-Associated Infection Prevention program at the CDC points out, “We can't control how fast bacteria develop resistance or how fast we develop new drugs, but antibiotic stewardship is 100% under our control.”