Variation in Outpatient Oral Antimicrobial Use Patterns among Canadian Provinces, 2000 to 2010
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The volume and patterns of antimicrobial drug use are key variables to consider when developing guidelines for prescribing, and programs to address stewardship and combat the increasing prevalence of antimicrobial resistant pathogens. Because drug programs are regulated at the provincial level, there is an expectation that antibiotic use may vary among provinces. OBJECTIVE: To assess these potential differences according to province and time. METHODS: Provincial antimicrobial prescribing data at the individual drug level were acquired from the Canadian Integrated Program for Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance for 2000 to 2010. Data were used to calculate two yearly metrics: prescriptions per 1000 inhabitant-days and the average defined daily doses per prescription. The proportion of liquid oral prescriptions of total prescriptions was also calculated as a proxy measure for the proportion of prescriptions given to children versus adults. To assess the significance of provincial antimicrobial use, linear mixed models were developed for each metric, accounting for repeated measurements over time. RESULTS: Significant differences among provinces were found, as well as significant changes in use over time. Newfoundland and Labrador was found to have significantly higher prescribing rates than all other provinces (P<0.001) in 2010, as well as the mean of all other provinces (P<0.001). In contrast, Quebec exhibited significantly lower prescribing than all other provinces (P<0.001 for all provinces except British Columbia, where P=0.024) and the mean of all other provinces (P<0.001). DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION: Reports of reductions in antimicrobial use at the Canadian level are promising, especially prescribing to children; however, care must be taken to avoid the pitfall of the ecological fallacy. Reductions are not consistent among the provinces or among the classes of antimicrobial drugs dispensed in Canada.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".