Campus Location

Dallas Campus (Online)

Date of Award

2-2024

ORCID

https://orcid.org/0009-0008-7393-1929

Document Type

DNP Project

Department

Nursing

Degree Name

Doctor of Nursing Practice

Committee Chair or Primary Advisor

Molly Kuhle

Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor

Catherine Garner

Third Committee Member or Committee Reader

N/A

Abstract

Antibiotics have revolutionized modern medicine; however, the overuse in urgent care and primary care significantly contributes to the global burden of infections resistant to available antimicrobial medicines. Approximately 30% of the antimicrobials prescribed in acute care settings are unnecessary. Patient demand for antibiotics has seemingly skyrocketed following the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Practitioners must be knowledgeable about antibiotic stewardship initiatives, such as the wait-and-see approach, to reduce antibiotic overuse and improve the trajectory of antibiotic resistance and patient health outcomes. The gap in practice was the limited awareness of scientific evidence-based tools to partner with patients and improve antibiotic prescription patterns. This scholarly project aimed to measure the effectiveness of antibiotic stewardship educational intervention for urgent care providers and to increase the self-efficacy of improved prescription patterns in practice. This project implored a quasi-experimental research design and statistically analyzed with the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The participant’s knowledge gain was measured with the Survey Questionnaire for Antibiotic Use and Antimicrobial Resistance (SQAUAR) on a 5-point Likert scale tool from strongly agree to strongly disagree. With a test statistic of 104 and a p-value of .031 (< .05), the null hypothesis was confidently rejected in favor of the hypothesis. Findings revealed that the intervention significantly improved providers’ knowledge and self-efficacy to adopt the wait-and-see antibiotic stewardship approach.

Keywords: provider education on misuse of antibiotics, wait-and-see approach, antibiotic resistance from overuse of antibiotics, causes of antibiotic misuse, antibiotic stewardship program in urgent care, effectiveness of antibiotic stewardship programs

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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