How do residential aged care antibiograms compare with other local resistance data?

Area of Science:

• Infectious Diseases
• Geriatric Medicine
• Antimicrobial Stewardship

Background:

• Antibiograms are crucial for optimizing antibiotic prescribing but are often unavailable for residential aged care facilities (RACFs).
• This study addresses the need for accessible resistance pattern data in Queensland, Australia's RACFs.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine if alternative data sources can approximate antibiotic resistance patterns in RACFs.
• To evaluate the utility of private pathology data and composite RACF data as proxies for RACF antibiograms.

Main Methods:

• Compared annual RACF-specific antibiograms with local hospital antibiograms from pathology providers.
• Compared composite antibiograms of geographically grouped RACF data with regional hospital and private pathology RACF antibiograms.
• Analyzed antibiotic susceptibility rates for common bacteria (E. coli, K. pneumoniae, E. faecalis, P. aeruginosa, S. aureus) using Fisher exact test and described concordance by percentage similarity.

Main Results:

• Composite RACF antibiograms showed high concordance (83%-100% similarity) with private pathology RACF data for key pathogen-antibiotic pairs.
• Individual RACF antibiograms exhibited variable similarity (50%-100%) when compared to local hospital data for all ages and elderly populations.

Conclusions:

• Private pathology RACF antibiograms can effectively serve as a proxy for resistance patterns in RACFs.
• Comparisons with hospital data provided inconsistent findings regarding resistance patterns.