A Study on Prescribing Pattern of Antimicrobial Agents Used in Treating Sepsis

Sepsis is defined as life threatening systemic or local infection due to dysregulated host response, which can lead to organ or tissue damage or death. Hence it is necessary to monitor the disease. Due to lack of data on prescription patterns, it is essential to conduct such studies. To analyze prescribing patterns of Antimicrobial agents used in treating sepsis.: It was a Prospective and Observational study which was conducted for a period of 6 months in all the departments of Apollo multi-specialty hospital. All the patients admitted with  sepsis during the study period were  screened for the use of any Antimicrobials. Those who met the inclusion and exclusion criteria, were enrolled for the study. Therapeutic data such as name of drugs, doses, route of administration, duration & other laboratory data was collected and documented in a suitably designed data collection form. The Data was evaluated by using suitable statistical tools. Out of 146 patients, 95 patients (28.28%) were prescribed with Carbapenem. In this study, blood was majorly used as specimen. The commonly found causative organism was E.coli in 50 patients (32.17%) which largely effected females than males. Meropenem was found to be the major drug sensitive to E.coli. Septic shock and death were the major complications found. Health care professionals must understand the usage of antimicrobial agents for specific conditions in sepsis patients so as to minimize adverse drug reactions, complications, antimicrobial agent resistance and improve patient quality of life. The number of antimicrobial drugs prescribed to this group of patients must be minimized so as to reduce toxic effects, burden of resistance, to ensure effective treatment and improve patient safety.