Half of patients in American hospitals were receiving an antibiotic on a given day in 2023, essentially the same share as in 2015, even though formal stewardship programs went from covering roughly four in five hospitals to nearly all of them over that period.
The finding comes from a point-prevalence survey conducted by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health departments, published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases and reported by CIDRAP. Reviewers examined records for 13,653 randomly selected patients at 218 hospitals across 10 states, surveyed between May and September of that year.
