CDC Antibiotic Stewardship Initiative Discussion Paper
Construct a professional paper that outlines the advanced practice role – as a nurse educator, a nurse leader, or a nurse practitioner – to advance the CDC’s antibiotic resistance initiative. The paper needs to be a minimum of six (6) pages [excluding title and reference pages] consistent with APA style without an abstract page. The paper is worth 40 points.
Please include the following:
Introduction that identifies your advanced practice role and your view of how that role will be able to impact the antibiotic resistance dilemma. Support your discussion with at least two references from the literature.
Review the CDC’s goals and identify one of the CDC’s key strategies that you will be able to promote/support in your advanced practice role. Support your discussion with at least two references from the literature.
Discuss three activities/actions that you will develop to support the promotion of the key strategy that you identified in item 2 above. Each action/activity needs to be well designed and supported with at least one reference from the literature. [For example, if you are a nurse educator student – in what course(s) will you be able to promote your identified key strategies, be specific about what that would look like using example lesson plan(s), identify any active learning strategies you will utilize, etc., and provide justification for your strategies, etc.; if you are a nurse leader student – what program(s) and activities will you engage with relative to your organization, be that existing programs or creation of new programs, reporting mechanisms, development of collaborative committees, etc., and provide justification for your strategies, etc.; if you are a nurse practitioner student – what prescribing practices, patient education practices, monitoring programs, etc., will you engage with, and provide justification for your strategies, etc.
The paper is to be formatted according to APA style . I am FNP student , so courses I take right now clinical decision making NU611 , where I actively involved in clinical experience and education of the patients.
Sample Paper
CDC Antibiotic Stewardship Initiative Discussion Paper
Pharmacology
Antimicrobial resistance has become a world’s major threat to health in modern medicine. Nurse practitioners have a significant role in mitigating risk associated with AMR. The primary goal of a nurse practitioner entails assessing, diagnosing, and treating diseases. The three goals are important in preventing the spread of AMR. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, three practices are critical to patients with AMR. They include redesigning outpatient clinical facilities and hospitals to prevent the spread of nosocomial infections, swift bedside diagnostics for evaluation of antimicrobial susceptibility to facilitate prescription of antimicrobial therapy, and reservation of expensive and last line of defense antimicrobials to longer inpatient treatment (Oerther & Oerther, 2020). The nurse practitioner is at the center of these activities as they are involved in treating and making a diagnosis.
Currently, a nurse practitioner cannot quickly and efficiently diagnose the majority of AMR types due to a centralized diagnostic laboratory that takes several days to obtain results. A nurse practitioner can accomplish the goal of preventing the spread of AMR by making a thorough history and physical examination and screening before bedside diagnostic are made available. Evidence indicates that an advanced nurse that is well equipped with adequate knowledge can lead in conducting a detailed and thorough medical history and prevent inappropriate empiric therapy and disseminate the concept of antibiotic stewardship to other health care providers (Byrd & Gerlach, 2020). Another facet of reducing antimicrobial resistance apart from diagnosis and prescription is infection prevention. A nurse practitioner can be at the forefront of preventing the spread of hospital-acquired infections. A nurse practitioner can achieve the spread of infections in the hospital by ensuring adherence to hygiene and other related protocols such as hand hygiene on their part, the patients, and other caregivers. They can collaborate with other health care professionals to ensure that proper guidelines are strictly followed. This may require training and education for both the staff and the patients.
One of the CDC’s Key Strategies That You Will Be Able to Promote/Support in Your Advanced Practice Role
CDC’s goals for combating antimicrobial resistance are outlined in the National Action Plan for Combating Antibiotic-Resistance Bacteria 2020-2025 that builds on the National Action Plan that was developed in 2014 in response to the Executive Order 13676 by President Obama. The Plan consists of a strategic plan that the government will take to improve the health and wellbeing of the citizens in the next five years by changing the course of antimicrobial resistance. The strategy to be adopted to promote as a nurse practitioner is slowing the emergence of resistant bacteria and preventing the spread of resistant infection. The CDC targets to reduce the rates of hospital-acquired antimicrobial-resistant infections and community-acquired antibiotic-resistant infections by 20 and 10 percent by the year 2025 (Federal Task Force on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria, 2020). Another aim is to increase national capacity to contain and control outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant infections. The strategy is expected to increase collaborative efforts at regional and national levels in prevention and response efforts in both military and the general population. CDC expected to publish a report on the issue of the animal pathogen to describe merging antibiotic resistance this year. The use of collaborative efforts is expected to increase and expand antibiotic-resistant outreach, increase the number of trained personnel, reduce the amount of dispensed antibiotics in outpatient facilities and increase the number of providers and facilities implementing CDC’s best practices.
In clinical practice as a nurse practitioner, drug prescription will play a major role. Based on the evidence, antibiotics are among the most common prescriptions, with an estimate of 56% of patients receiving antimicrobial therapy with a significant number of the prescriptions being inappropriate (Velez & Sloand, 2016). Inappropriate prescriptions can be associated with a knowledge gap, challenges in differentiating between viral and bacterial infections, demand by patients, the assumption by the prescriber that the use of antibiotic therapy is the safest option, and time constraints. Inappropriate antibiotic prescription leads to adverse impacts on health, clinical failure, financial burden, cross-contamination, and death. Antimicrobial-resistant infections account for more than 23,000 annual deaths, a loss of $20 billion in health care costs, and $35 billion due to lost productivity (Velez & Sloand, 2016).
Despite a number of factors being associated with antibiotic resistance, the use of antibiotics is the major factor causing antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic therapy is considered one of the life-saving therapies hence a challenge to the researchers, policymakers, and prescribers to mitigate the escalating hazard. Inappropriate prescriptions of antibiotics from the broad spectrum of antibiotics in a particular family changes the ecology of bacteria from another household member while the resistant organism spread. Repeated exposure to antibiotic therapy results in mutation and replication of the resistant microbe leading to multiple mechanisms of resistance to a certain strain of bacteria. Common infections become difficult to treat, increasing the risk of death. Multidisciplinary researchers continue to investigate the reasons behind the significant increase in antibiotic prescriptions by providers (Velez & Sloand, 2016). Health care providers, especially those with the authority to prescribe medication, should at the forefront to slow the emergence of resistant bacteria and reduce the spread of antimicrobial-resistant infections.
