The Role of the Pharmacist in Clinical Settings (9): Efforts to Support Antibacterial Stewardship by Full-time Pharmacists in the Intensive Care Unit

Efficient antimicrobial stewardship (AS) effectively involves monitoring targets for infectious disease treatments, including the use of antimicrobial agents, infectious disease test results, special populations, and special pathological conditions. Many institutions have collaborated with antimicrobial stewardship teams (ASTs) to evaluate antibiotic use and infectious disease test results and have reported their usefulness. Although the intensive care unit (ICU) is considered an intervention for special populations, AST intervention alone in the ICU is insufficient, and no usefulness of AST has been reported to date. This study investigated the patient mortality rate and susceptibility to antimicrobial and antifungal drugs in the ICU before and after a pharmacist was assigned to actively perform AS.