These data demonstrate a well-developed structure of AMTs in Belgian hospitals and the broad range of services provided. Technical and financial support by healthcare authorities was key to the extensive implementation of antimicrobial stewardship programmes across the national hospital care system.
Since 2002, the Belgian Antibiotic Policy Coordination Committee (BAPCOC) has supported the development of antibiotic management teams (AMTs) in Belgian hospitals with policy guidance and federal funding for antibiotic managers. We report on the analysis of the activity reports for the year 2011 and compare the results with those for 2007. A structured questionnaire survey was performed on the composition, organisation and service activities of the AMT in all acute care and larger chronic care hospitals in the country in 2011. Descriptive statistics were stratified by duration of AMT funding. Completed questionnaires were provided by 105 of 109 hospitals (response rate 96.3%). The AMTs have further formalised their working method over the previous years. Significantly higher implementation rates were achieved in 2011 for concurrent review for antibiotic therapies (92.0% in 2011 vs. 64.2% in 2007), for the de-escalation of therapy after a few days (93.0% in 2011 vs. 63.9% in 2007) and for sequential i.v.-oral therapy for antibiotics with equivalent bioavailability (86.0% in 2011 vs. 78.7% in 2007). The AMTs who first joined the project were able to maintain their activities at a high level, while those who last joined the national project in 2007 made considerable progress 4 years later. This has also resulted in significantly higher implementation rates for the totality of the acute care hospitals. The presence of AMTs in all hospitals also proves to be a great boon when setting up projects, surveys and studies on a(n) (inter)national level.
Preliminary evaluation using the NCCLS evaluation protocols EP10-A2 and EP9-A2, may provide valuable information on performance characteristics of blood gas analyzers.
Background and Objectives
Belgian health authorities launched a national platform in 2011 to improve the quality of transfusion practices and blood use in Belgian hospitals. No data were available about the quality of hospital transfusion practice at the national level.
Materials and Methods
Three consecutive national surveys (2012, 2014 and 2016) were performed in all 111 Belgian hospitals to assess the degree of implementation of standards in four process domains related to red blood cell (RBC) transfusion: general quality aspects, ordering of RBC, electronic traceability and reporting of adverse events. The surveys were part of a methodology based on informing, feedback and benchmarking. Responses to questions were analysed semi‐quantitatively, and hospitals could score 10 points on each of the domains.
Results
The proportion of hospitals scoring below 5 per domain decreased from 16%, 70%, 14% and 11% (2012) to 2%, 17%, 1% and 1% (2016), respectively. Similarly, scores above 7.5 increased from 25%, 1%, 23% and 36% (2012) to 64%, 30%, 68% and 81% (2016), respectively. In 2016, overall quality of transfusion practices, including the four pre‐specified domains, improved continuously with an average total score (max = 40) increasing from 24.2 to 30.5 (p = 0.0005). In addition, there was a decrease in the number of distributed and transfused RBC per 1000 population between 2011 and 2019 from 47.0 to 36.5 and 43.5 to 36.1, respectively.
Conclusion
These data show that the applied methodology was a powerful tool to improve quality of transfusion practices and to optimize utilization of RBC at the national level.
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