European Antibiotic Awareness Day is held each year on November 18th. That same week also marks World Antimicrobial Awareness Week. This year during that week, the University of Rijeka, Faculty of Medicine, and Clinical Hospital Center Rijeka are promoting the manual “Guidelines for hospital use of antimicrobial drugs” edited by a clinical pharmacology specialist, Prof. Vera Vlahović Palčevski, M.D., Ph.D. As co-publishers, they are promoting it as a contribution to marking the day and week of antibiotic awareness. This is the fifth, revised, and supplemented edition of the booklet, which has been published regularly since 2006.
“Antibiotics are a civilizational medical achievement from which the lives and health of the entire population get the greatest benefit only with strictly professional recommendations and indications, which gives special significance to the European Antibiotic Awareness Day. This also gives a great expected benefit of new guidelines issued by the Clinical Hospital Center Rijeka in cooperation with the Faculty of Medicine”, said Prof. Alen Ružić, M.D., Ph.D., Director of CHC Rijeka.
These guidelines are intended for physicians of all specialties who prescribe antibiotics, as well as medical, dental, and postgraduate specialist students. The shape and size are adjusted to the size of a doctor’s coat pocket so that they can be accessed at any time.
“We hope this manual will at least somewhat contribute to slowing down the development of bacterial resistance and make antibiotics as effective as possible. On average, every third hospitalized patient receives some antimicrobial drug, and at least half of them is prescribed unnecessarily or incorrectly. The reasons for that are numerous, but the most common one is diagnostic uncertainty when they are prescribed ‘just in case”’, Professor Vlahović Palčevski points out.
The result of it is the galloping development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, so today we are faced with infections for which there is no longer an effective treatment. In EU countries, around 33,000 people die each year as a result of infections caused by resistant bacteria, which is more than if a plane with more than 600 passengers crashed in the Union every week.