Can you be a good steward of antibiotics and maintain high levels of patient satisfaction? It depends!
As we move into cold and flu season, we know the number of patient antibiotic requests will be on the rise.
We all know the importance of antibiotic stewardship and the impact of inappropriate antibiotic use. We also know the significance of patient satisfaction, especially in urgent care medicine. This begs the question: Can you be both a good steward of antibiotics and maintain a high level of patient satisfaction?
We recently asked our Instagram followers whether or not they felt like antibiotic prescribing was linked to patient satisfaction. Here’s what they said:
In this month’s Paper Chase on Urgent Care RAP, Nate and Brett dive into this topic with a discussion of a recent paper by Cziner et al, “Effects of patient beliefs regarding the need for antibiotics and prescribing outcomes on patient satisfaction in urgent-care settings.”
These authors found that patient satisfaction was significantly associated with patient expectations for antibiotics, but only for those with moderate to high expectations, not those with low expectations.
In other words, patients coming to the urgent care with a high expectation for receiving an antibiotic had higher levels of satisfaction upon receiving an antibiotic prescription, whereas lower levels of satisfaction occurred when an antibiotic was not prescribed. Makes sense!
What’s been your experience with these patients? What can we do to help inform a patient’s expectations around antibiotic prescribing? If you're a UC RAP subscriber, join the discussion on our platform!
Talk to you soon!
The Urgent Care RAP Team