Antibiotic Prescribing 2020

Tuesday 22 December 2020

For a number of years HSC has been encouraging the community to only take antibiotics when necessary and not to try to pressurise doctors to prescribe them unnecessarily.

Antibiotics aren't effective for common viral infections. They cannot help you recover from a cold or a 'flu faster or prevent the spread to other people. For adults who are otherwise healthy, common viral infections and many milder bacterial infections will resolve in a few days without active treatment. These drugs can cause unpleasant side effects and increase resistance to the drugs in individuals and in the community.

Reducing use is the most effective way of reducing resistance.

Data regarding the first 10 months of 2020 are now available which show a significant decrease for 2020.

Geraldine O'Riordan, Prescribing Adviser said:

'It is pleasing to see a year on year reduction in the prescribing of antibiotics. The data for the first 10 months of this year has seen a significant reduction in prescribing numbers. This is a result of increased awareness on the wise use of antibiotics, improved hand hygiene measures as a result of COVId-19 and an increase in the update of the flu vaccine.'

We know that lockdown in March this year will have impacted on prescribing numbers as many islanders had reduced access to their GP practices and some were isolating and not, therefore, spreading infections. It was also very warm.

We have, therefore, looked at a month by month comparison to see how much of an impact lockdown had. As you can see from the results below, the fall in prescribing was maintained until the end of October with, to the best of our knowledge, no one coming to harm as a result of the reduced prescribing.

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