The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Get Smart About Antibiotics Week 2015 offers an opportunity for urgent care center management to get the word out about both their own services and the importance of responsible antibiotic use.
With more than a third of urgent care centers in the US writing between 73 and 144 prescriptions for antibiotics each month, clinicians are all too familiar with the patient who shows up looking for a Z-Pak at the first sneeze or sniffle. Just as often, patients who’ve received antibiotics appropriately stop taking them as soon as their symptoms subside, at the risk of developing resistance.
The answer to both challenges is solid education—and urgent care clinicians are ideally suited to provide it, while the CDC’s annual public outreach initiative, this year scheduled to take place November 16-22, may be the ideal vehicle.
The CDC has a dedicated website for the event (http://www.cdc.gov/getsmart/community/materials-references/index.html), offering material suitable for print, video, web, and social media, as well as digital press kits that can support an urgent care center’s public outreach efforts. The agency also plans to launch its own activities to raise the public’s consciousness of appropriate antibiotic use, including release of fact sheets and infographics, hosting a Twitter chat, and recognizing concurrent antibiotic awareness initiatives across the globe.