Long-Term Effects of Phased Implementation of Antimicrobial Stewardship in Academic ICUs: 2007-2015.

OBJECTIVES: Antimicrobial stewardship is advocated to reduce antimicrobial resistance in ICUs by reducing unnecessary antimicrobial consumption. Evidence has been limited to short, single-center studies. We evaluated whether antimicrobial stewardship in ICUs could reduce antimicrobial consumption and costs. DESIGN: We conducted a phased, multisite cohort study of a quality improvement initiative. SETTING: Antimicrobial stewardship was implemented in four academic ICUs in Toronto, Canada beginning in February 2009 and ending in July 2012. PATIENTS: All patients admitted to each ICU from January 1, 2007, to December 31, 2015, were included. INTERVENTIONS: Antimicrobial stewardship was delivered using in-person coaching by pharmacists and physicians three to five times weekly, and supplemented with unit-based performance reports. Total monthly antimicrobial consumption (measured by defined daily doses/100 patient-days) and costs (Canadian dollars/100 patient-days) before and after antimicrobial stewardship implementation were measured. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: A total of 239,123 patient-days (57,195 patients) were analyzed, with 148,832 patient-days following introduction of antimicrobial stewardship. Antibacterial use decreased from 120.90 to 110.50 defined daily dose/100 patient-days following introduction of antimicrobial stewardship (adjusted intervention effect -12.12 defined daily dose/100 patient-days; 95% CI, -16.75 to -7.49; p < 0.001) and total antifungal use decreased from 30.53 to 27.37 defined daily doses/100 patient-days (adjusted intervention effect -3.16 defined daily dose/100 patient-days; 95% CI, -8.33 to 0.04; p = 0.05). Monthly antimicrobial costs decreased from $3195.56 to $1998.59 (adjusted intervention effect -$642.35; 95% CI, -$905.85 to -$378.84; p < 0.001) and total antifungal costs were unchanged from $1771.86 to $2027.54 (adjusted intervention effect -$355.27; 95% CI, -$837.88 to $127.33; p = 0.15). Mortality remained unchanged, with no consistent effects on antimicrobial resistance and candidemia. CONCLUSIONS: Antimicrobial stewardship in ICUs with coaching plus audit and feedback is associated with sustained improvements in antimicrobial consumption and cost. ICUs with high antimicrobial consumption or expenditure should consider implementing antimicrobial stewardship programs.

Donation after circulatory death: burying the dead donor rule.

Despite continuing controversies regarding the vital status of both brain-dead donors and individuals who undergo donation after circulatory death (DCD), respecting the dead donor rule (DDR) remains the standard moral framework for organ procurement. The DDR increases organ supply without jeopardizing trust in transplantation systems, reassuring society that donors will not experience harm during organ procurement. While the assumption that individuals cannot be harmed once they are dead is reasonable in the case of brain-dead protocols, we argue that the DDR is not an acceptable strategy to protect donors from harm in DCD protocols. We propose a threefold alternative to justify organ procurement practices: (1) ensuring that donors are sufficiently protected from harm; (2) ensuring that they are respected through informed consent; and (3) ensuring that society is fully informed of the inherently debatable nature of any criterion to declare death.

Medication reconciliation during internal hospital transfer and impact of computerized prescriber order entry.

BACKGROUND: Internal hospital transfer is a vulnerable time during which patients are at high risk of medication discrepancies that can result in clinically significant harm, medication errors, and adverse drug events. OBJECTIVE: To identify, characterize, and assess the clinical impact of unintentional medication discrepancies during internal hospital transfer and to investigate the influence of computerized prescriber order entry (CPOE) on medication discrepancies. METHODS: All patients transferred between 10 inpatient units at 2 tertiary care hospitals were prospectively assessed to identify discrepancies. Interfaces included transfers between (1) units that both used paper-based medication ordering systems; (2) units that both used CPOE-based systems; and (3) units that used both paper-based and CPOE-based systems (hybrid transfer). The primary endpoint was the number of patients with at least 1 unintentional medication discrepancy during internal hospital transfer. Discrepancies were identified through assessment and comparison of a best possible medication transfer list with the actual transfer orders. A multidisciplinary team of clinicians assessed the potential clinical impact and severity of unintentional discrepancies. RESULTS: Overall, 190 patients were screened and 129 patients were included. Eighty patients (62.0%) had at least 1 unintentional medication discrepancy at the time of transfer, and the most common discrepancy was medication omission (55.6%). Factors that independently increased the risk of a patient experiencing at least 1 unintentional discrepancy included lack of best possible medication history, increasing number of home medications, and increasing number of transfer medications. Forty-seven patients (36.4%) had at least 1 unintentional discrepancy with the potential to cause discomfort and/or clinical deterioration. The risk of discrepancies was present regardless of the medication-ordering system (paper, CPOE, or hybrid). CONCLUSIONS: Clinically significant medication discrepancies occur commonly during internal hospital transfer. A structured, collaborative, and clearly defined medication reconciliation process is needed to prevent internal transfer discrepancies and patient harm.

Ethical considerations for classifying patients as 'palliative' when calculating Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratios.

The Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratio (HSMR) is a commonly used measure of hospital mortality that is standardised for age, comorbidities and other factors. By tradition, this statistic has always excluded patients classified as 'palliative'. The HSMR has never been validated as a reliable measure of quality of care, and it can be very hard to interpret, partly due to difficulties with defining and applying the term 'palliative'. In this paper, we review the Canadian experience with the palliative status flag, and explain why it is so difficult to define and apply consistently. We also highlight some potential concerns about clinicians labelling inpatients as 'palliative' during their admission. Finally, we propose an organisational ethics framework, and six specific suggestions for hospitals to use when publishing statistics such as the HSMR.

A retrospective cohort pilot study to evaluate a triage tool for use in a pandemic.

INTRODUCTION: The objective of this pilot study was to assess the usability of the draft Ontario triage protocol, to estimate its potential impact on patient outcomes, and ability to increase resource availability based on a retrospective cohort of critically ill patients cared for during a non-pandemic period. METHODS: Triage officers applied the protocol prospectively to 2 retrospective cohorts of patients admitted to 2 academic medical/surgical ICUs during an 8 week period of peak occupancy. Each patient was assigned a treatment priority (red -- 'highest', yellow -- 'intermediate', green -- 'discharge to ward', or blue/black -- 'expectant') by the triage officers at 3 separate time points (at the time of admission to the ICU, 48, and 120 hours post admission). RESULTS: Overall, triage officers were either confident or very confident in 68.4% of their scores; arbitration was required in 54.9% of cases. Application of the triage protocol would potentially decrease the number of required ventilator days by 49.3% (568 days) and decrease the total ICU days by 52.6% (895 days). On the triage protocol at ICU admission the survival rate in the red (93.7%) and yellow (62.5%) categories were significantly higher then that of the blue category (24.6%) with associated P values of < 0.0001 and 0.0003 respectively. Further, the survival rate of the red group was significantly higher than the overall survival rate of 70.9% observed in the cohort (P < 0.0001). At 48 and 120 hours, survival rates in the blue group increased but remained lower then the red or yellow groups. CONCLUSIONS: Refinement of the triage protocol and implementation is required prior to future study, including improved training of triage officers, and protocol modification to minimize the exclusion from critical care of patients who may in fact benefit. However, our results suggest that the triage protocol can help to direct resources to patients who are most likely to benefit, and help to decrease the demands on critical care resources, thereby making available more resources to treat other critically ill patients.

Developing an innovative care delivery model: interprofessional practice teams.

An interprofessional project team at the University Health Network (UHN) completed a project to develop an Interprofessional Patient-Centred Practice (IPCP) Framework, explore enablers and barriers to collaborative practice and recommend a model of care delivery and interprofessional practice. The following recommendations were made: adopt proposed IPCP Framework as the basis for developing interprofessional teams, implement an IPCP tool kit as a resource, develop evidence-based interventions across health care teams, and educate health professionals on IPCP.

Development of a triage protocol for critical care during an influenza pandemic.

BACKGROUND: The recent outbreaks of avian influenza (H5N1) have placed a renewed emphasis on preparing for an influenza pandemic in humans. Of particular concern in this planning is the allocation of resources, such as ventilators and antiviral medications, which will likely become scarce during a pandemic. METHODS: We applied a collaborative process using best evidence, expert panels, stakeholder consultations and ethical principles to develop a triage protocol for prioritizing access to critical care resources, including mechanical ventilation, during a pandemic. RESULTS: The triage protocol uses the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment score and has 4 main components: inclusion criteria, exclusion criteria, minimum qualifications for survival and a prioritization tool. INTERPRETATION: This protocol is intended to provide guidance for making triage decisions during the initial days to weeks of an influenza pandemic if the critical care system becomes overwhelmed. Although we designed this protocol for use during an influenza pandemic, the triage protocol would apply to patients both with and without influenza, since all patients must share a single pool of critical care resources.

Bench-to-bedside review: Ethical challenges for those in directing roles in critical care units.

Though much attention in the medical literature has focused on the ethics of critical care, it seems to be disproportionately weighted toward clinical issues. On the presumption that the operational management of an intensive care unit (ICU) also requires ethical considerations, it would be useful to know what these are. This review undertook to identify what literature exists with regard to the non-clinical issues of ethical importance in the ICU as encountered by clinician-managers. We found that in addition to issues of resource allocation, there exist many areas of ethical importance to clinician-managers in the ICU that have been described only superficially. We argue that a renewed focus on ICU ethics is merited to shed light on these other, non-clinical, issues.

Patients' preferences for enrolment into critical-care trials.

BACKGROUND: Most critically ill patients are incapable of providing informed consent for research. OBJECTIVE: We sought to determine patients' preferences for different consent frameworks for enrolling incapable patients into critical-care trials. DESIGN: Prospective observational and structured interview study. SETTING: Five university-affiliated hospitals in Ontario. PATIENTS: Two-hundred and forty consecutive capable and consenting survivors of critical illness. INTERVENTION: Participants considered four frameworks for enrolling incapable patients into clinical trials using a baseline scenario and three permutations for: risk (very low vs. high), treatment type (new vs. currently available), and availability of substitute decision-maker (yes vs. no). MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: For each scenario, patients chose their preferred framework and rated the acceptability of each framework using a seven-point Likert scale. Most (180/240; 76%) patients selected "consent by substitute prior to enrolment" as their preferred framework; this also received the highest baseline acceptability ratings ("acceptable" or "highly acceptable" 207/240; 87%). Modifying risk or treatment type did not substantially change these ratings. A minority of patients rated delayed consent as unacceptable or highly unacceptable in both the baseline scenario (48/240, 20% delayed to substitute; 57/240, 24% delayed to patient) and when a substitute was unavailable (34/240; 15%). CONCLUSIONS: Most survivors of critical illness found the usual practice of obtaining informed consent from a substitute decision-maker prior to enrolment in a clinical trial to be acceptable. Nearly half of patients considered foregoing informed consent to be unacceptable, whereas a minority considered enrolment followed by delayed consent to be unacceptable even when a substitute was unavailable. These approaches should, therefore, only be considered when deviating from the usual practice of obtaining consent from a substitute decision-maker is truly justified, such as where treatments being tested need to be delivered as soon as possible in order to be effective.

DNR directives are established early in mechanically ventilated intensive care unit patients.

PURPOSE: Setting treatment goals in the intensive care unit (ICU) often involves resuscitation decisions. Our objective was to study the rate of establishing do-not-resuscitate (DNR) directives, determinants, and outcomes of those directives for mechanically ventilated patients. METHODS: In a multicentre observational study, we included consecutive adults with no DNR directives within 24 hr of ICU admission who were mechanically ventilated for at least 48 hr. We identified the rate with which DNR directives were established, and factors associated with these directives. RESULTS: Among 765 patients, DNR directives were established for 231 (30.2%) patients; 143 (62.1%) of these were established within the first week. Factors independently associated with a DNR directive were: patient age [> or = 75 yr (hazard ratio [HR] 2.3, 95% confidence interval 1.5-3.4], 65 to 74 yr (HR 1.8, 1.2-2.7), 50 to 64 yr (HR 1.4, 1.0-2.2) relative to < 50 yr); medical rather than surgical diagnosis (HR 1.8, 1.3-2.5); multiple organ dysfunction score (HR 1.7 for each five-point increment, 1.4-2.0); physician prediction of ICU survival [< 10% (HR 15.0, 6.7-33.6)], 10 to 40% [(HR 5.0, 2.3-11.2), 41 to 60% (HR 4.0, 1.8-9.0) relative to > 90%]; and physician perception of patient preference to limit life support (no advanced life support [(HR 5.8, 3.6-9.4) or partial advanced life support (HR 3.2, 2.2-4.6) compared to full measures]. CONCLUSION: One third of mechanically ventilated patients had DNR directives established early during their ICU stay after the first 24 hr of admission. The strongest predictors of DNR directives were physician prediction of low probability of survival, physician perception of patient preference to limit life support, organ dysfunction, medical diagnosis and age.