Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 190

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 4 of the 4 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Successful use of feedback to improve antibiotic prescribing and reduce Clostridium difficile infection: a controlled interrupted time series

Open access
Fowler, S., Webber, A., Cooper, B. S., Phimister, A., Price, K., Carter, Y., Kibbler, C. C., Simpson, A. J. H., Stone, S. P.·2007·Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: To investigate the effect of reinforcing a narrow-spectrum antibiotic policy on antibiotic prescription and Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) rates by feedback of antibiotic use to doctors, as part of a departmental audit and feedback programme. DESIGN: A prospective controlled interrupted time-series (ITS) study, with pre-defined pre- and post-intervention periods, each of 21 months. SETTING: Three acute medical wards for elderly people in a teaching hospital. PARTICIPANTS: Six thousand one hundred and twenty-nine consecutive unselected acute medical admissions aged >or=80 years. INTERVENTIONS: A 'narrow-spectrum' antibiotic policy (reinforced by an established programme of audit and feedback of antibiotic usage and CDI rates) was introduced, following an unplanned rise in amoxicillin/clavulanate (Augmentin) use. It targeted broad-spectrum antibiotics for reduction (cephalosporins and amoxicillin/clavulanate) and narrow-spectrum antibiotics for increase (benzyl penicillin, amoxicillin and trimethoprim). Changes in the use of targeted antibiotics (intervention group) were compared with those of untargeted antibiotics (control group) using segmented regression analysis. Changes in CDI rates were examined by the Poisson regression model. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) acquisition rates acted as an additional control. RESULTS: There was a reduction in the use of all targeted broad-spectrum antibiotics and an increase in all targeted narrow-spectrum antibiotics, statistically significant for sudden change and/or linear trend. All other antibiotic use remained unchanged. CDI rates fell with incidence rate ratios of 0.35 (0.17, 0.73) (P=0.009). MRSA incidence did not change [0.79 (0.49, 1.28); P=0.32]. CONCLUSIONS: This is the first controlled prospective ITS study to use feedback to reinforce antibiotic policy and reduce CDI. Multicentre ITS or cluster randomized trials of this and other methods need to be undertaken to establish the most effective means of optimizing antibiotic use and reducing CDI.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1093/jac/dkm014

Cites

4 of 4 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 4 references

Cited by

See all 190

Metadata

Authors
Fowler, S., Webber, A., Cooper, B. S., Phimister, A., Price, K., Carter, Y., Kibbler, C. C., Simpson, A. J. H., & Stone, S. P.
Venue
Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy
Published
2007-03-26
Volume
59
Issue
5
Pages
990-995
ISSN
  • 0305-7453 (ISSN-L)
  • 1460-2091
OpenAlex
W2110574020
Cited by
190
References
4
FWCI
15.58
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Successful use of feedback to improve antibiotic prescribing and reduce Clostridium difficile infection: a controlled interrupted time series. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/jac/dkm014
The paper
Fowler, S., Webber, A., Cooper, B. S., Phimister, A., Price, K., Carter, Y., Kibbler, C. C., Simpson, A. J. H., & Stone, S. P. (2007). Successful use of feedback to improve antibiotic prescribing and reduce Clostridium difficile infection: a controlled interrupted time series. Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. https://doi.org/10.1093/jac/dkm014

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.