Children hospitalized with severe pneumonia who moved from intravenous antibiotics to oral ones as soon as they started improving did about as well as children who stayed on the full five-day IV course, and they went home roughly a day sooner. The result comes from a randomized trial of 1,101 children reported in The Lancet and covered by CIDRAP.
One point matters before anything else. The trial was conducted at 13 hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa, in settings where World Health Organization guidance and resource constraints shape care. It answers a question about the timing of a switch. It does not tell an American parent whether their child needs antibiotics, which antibiotic to use, or when to leave the hospital.
