Inappropriate strategies that are associated with prescribing antibiotics often lead to bacterial resistance to certain medications. As a result, it is important to address this problem by changing approaches to prescribing and using antibiotics while treating adults and children (Peate, Wild, & Nair, 2014). To respond to this tendency, it is important to develop or improve protocols for regulating the prescription of antibiotics. Nurses and practitioners should answer a range of questions regarding a patient’s state and symptoms, as well as identified bacteria, before prescribing a medication (Marc, Vrignaud, Levieux, Robine, & Guen, 2016). Furthermore, the focus should be on proposing herbal medications or therapies in those cases when it is possible to avoid using antibiotics.
Therefore, the main task of a health care provider is to analyze alternative options for treating patients and choose antibiotics only when other variants are potentially ineffective or harmful. Moreover, the main task of a patient is to follow recommendations regarding the dosage and schedule of consuming medications strictly. It is a patient’s responsibility to avoid misuse of antibiotics while following a health care provider’s recommendations. There are many situations when the use of antibiotics can be avoided because a certain condition can be treated with the help of alternative or herbal medications. Also, many patients often have allergies to some types of antibiotics, and this aspect should be taken into account while planning an effective treatment (Marc et al., 2016). Even if an organization has protocols and instructions regarding the antibiotic prescription and use, cases of misuse can be frequent, and a special committee should take actions to prevent such situations. However, the problem is in the fact that many healthcare organizations have no such committees, and the control is realized only concerning the developed protocols.
As a result, the prescription and use of these medications should be monitored. It is inappropriate to make patients suffer, as well as to avoid giving antibiotics when they are necessary. Still, it is also inappropriate to provide all patients with prescriptions to take antibiotics when they visit a doctor with symptoms of a cold, for instance. There are no reasons to return to the ‘Pre-Antibiotic Era,’ but the use of these medications should be controlled to prevent bacterial resistance that is a threat to patients (Marc et al., 2016). However, researchers and practitioners continue working in this field to find effective alternative options or new types of antibiotics.
Teixobactin is among these new antibiotics, and its study is actively promoted. Thus, teixobactin seems to be effective against Gram-positive bacteria, and this quality allows for speaking about coping with the resistance of Staphylococcus aureus or Streptococcus pneumonia among other bacteria. Currently, it is impossible to state that this substance can be viewed as an effective alternative to all other antibiotics against bacteria with high levels of resistance, but it is also impossible to ignore the potential of teixobactin to address the discussed problem (Piddock, 2015). Therefore, it is important to note that, in the future, this new antibiotic will provide health care practitioners with more opportunities to cope with the problem of bacterial resistance and prescription of effective drugs.
From this point, although antibiotics are viewed as effective to treat diseases provoked by bacteria, their resistance to these medications is an urgent problem. Misuse of antibiotics is one of the causes associated with increases in bacterial resistance. As a result, healthcare administrators, practitioners, and nurses should pay much attention to addressing this problem and avoiding the inappropriate prescription of antibiotics.
References
Marc, C., Vrignaud, B., Levieux, K., Robine, A., & Guen, C. (2016). Inappropriate prescription of antibiotics in pediatric practice: Analysis of the prescriptions in primary care. Journal of Child Health Care, 20(4), 530-536.
Peate, I., Wild, K., & Nair, M. (2014). Nursing practice: Knowledge and care. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.
Piddock, L. J. (2015). Teixobactin, the first of a new class of antibiotics discovered by iChip technology? Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, 70(10), 2679-2680.