Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

36 QUALITY IMPROVEMENT & MEASUREMENT Antibiotic resistance is low priority for many primary care practices, study finds By Mackenzie Bean M ost primary care physicians acknowledge antibiotic resistance is an issue — but not in their own practices, a study published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases found. Researchers surveyed 1,550 internal, family and pediatric medicine phy- sicians in the U.S. from August 2018 to October 2018. Five study findings: 1. A majority (94 percent) of physicians acknowledged that antibiotic resistance is an issue in the U.S. 2. However, 55 percent said it was not a concern in their own practices. 3. Overall, respondents ranked antibiotic resistance as less important than other health issues such as obesity, opioids and vaccine hesitancy. 4. Ninety-one percent of physicians said antibiotic stewardship pro- grams are appropriate for physician offices. 5. Forty-seven percent of respondents said they'd need a lot of help implementing a stewardship program. n Black newborn mortality rate cut in half when treated by Black physicians By Gabrielle Masson B lack newborns die at triple the rate of white newborns, but that disparity is cut in half when they're cared for by Black physicians, according to a study published Aug. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers analyzed 1.8 million hospital births occurring in Florida from 1992 to 2015. The findings suggest that newborn-physician racial concordance is associated with a significant improvement in mortality for Black infants. Furthermore, the effects appear to manifest more strongly in more complicated cases and when hospitals deliver more Black newborns. No such improvement was seen in maternal mortality when birthing mothers share race with their physician. "A large body of work has highlighted the fact that Black newborns are significantly more likely to die during birth than white new- borns," said Brad Greenwood, PhD, lead study author and associate professor of information systems and operations management sci- ences at Fairfax, Va.-based George Mason University. "These results underscore the need to investigate the drivers of such behavior to gain a better understanding of the reasons why Black physicians sys- tematically outperform their white colleagues when caring for Black newborns at the individual, team and institutional level." n Hospitals with fewer ICU beds linked to worse COVID-19 outcomes By Anuja Vaidya P atients with COVID-19 who were admitted to smaller hospitals with less than 50 intensive care unit beds had a higher risk of death, a study found. Published in JAMA Internal Medicine, the study assessed 2,215 adults with COVID-19 who were admitted to ICUs at 65 hospitals across the U.S. from March 4 to April 4. e patients had at least one underlying condition. Aer 28 days of ICU admission, 784 patients had died, 824 had been discharged and 607 remained hospitalized. Patients admitted to hospitals with fewer than 50 ICU beds had a more than threefold higher risk of death compared to patients admitted to hospitals with more than 100 ICU beds. n Infant mortality hit record low in 2018, CDC says By Mackenzie Bean T he U.S. infant mortality rate fell to a record low in 2018, according to CDC data released July 16. The CDC recorded 21,498 infant deaths in 2018, down from 22,341 deaths a year prior. The infant mortality rate declined from 5.79 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2017 to 5.67 in 2018 — the lowest rate reported in U.S. history. Infants born to Black women had the high- est mortality rate in 2018, while babies born to Asian mothers had the lowest. The findings are based on a CDC analysis of birth and death certificates registered in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in 2018. n

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