Should you benchmark antibiotic usage?
It is important that practices understand their use of antibiotics and monitor trends at clinical meetings.
When it comes to taking a 'one health' approach to tackling antimicrobial resistance, prescriptions for humans and food producing animals tend to be at the forefront of discussions.
However, recent research suggests that the use of fluoroquinolones and third generation cephalosporins is consistently higher in cats than dogs, regardless of the main reason for presentation. In cats, prescriptions are largely composed of third generation cephalosporins.
These antibiotics are critically important for human health and should be reserved for critical conditions, where other classes or sub-classes of antibiotics have failed or are expected to fail. Prescribing should also be based on susceptibility testing, taking official and local antibiotic policies into account.
Speaking at BSAVA Congress today (6 April), Alan Radford of the University of Liverpool said research has also shown a high level of variability in antibacterial prescription (ABP) among practices.
With the above in mind, Radford discussed the need for practices to monitor and benchmark their ABPs with other anonymised practices, particularly for critically important antibiotics.
It is important that practices understand their use of antibiotics and monitor trends at clinical meetings. Multidisciplinary reviews could be carried out on a selection of cases and the use of critical antibiotics could require more than one practitioner to agree.
Practices participating in the Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNET) already benefit from such benchmarking, while non-members can make use of MySAVSNET, which allows practices to input simple usage statistics, for comparison with anonymised practices.
Veterinary practices are being urged to help owners safely dispose of any unused and expired pet medicines - not just antibiotics - during November's Animal Medicines Amnesty. 
