Antibiotic prescriptive practices for pharyngitis at a university health clinic

Abstract

A retrospective chart audit was conducted on 200 medical records drawn from over 900 university health clinic patients with the ICD-9 code for pharyngitis. One hundred subjects diagnosed with GABHS pharyngitis and 100 subjects diagnosed with NGABHS pharyngitis were randomly selected from the total. For this study, the following variables were studied: laboratory diagnosis of GABHS pharyngitis, laboratory diagnosis of NGABHS pharyngitis, antibiotic medication prescribed, and the specific types of antibiotic medication prescribed. There was a significant difference in the total number of patients prescribed antibiotics with GAB HS compared to the total number of patients prescribed antibiotics with NGABHS pharyngitis. There was also a significant difference in the number of patients with GABHS receiving the antibiotics keflex or penicillin compared to the NGABHS patients. The study found that over half of the patients diagnosed with NGABHS were given antibiotics.