Antibiotic use in surgical infections at a tertiary teaching hospital in Ghana.

Objective: The study aimed to assess antibiotic prescribing and use patterns at the Department of Surgery, Korle Bu Teaching Hospital.

Design: A cross-sectional study design was employed in this study.

Setting: The study was conducted at the Department of Surgery, Korle Bu Teaching Hospital.

Participants: Forty-two prescribers out of 63 (67%) at the Department of Surgery responded to questionnaires. Over the study period, prescriptions and medical records of 1715 patients from the general surgery, neurosurgery, and urology units were reviewed.

Main outcome measures: Percentage of prescriptions with antibiotics, percentage of prescribers using guidelines for antibiotic prescriptions, and percentage using culture and sensitivity to inform antibiotic prescriptions.

Results: Of the 1715 prescriptions assessed, 75% (1294/1715) were from inpatients, and 45% (772/1715) included an antibiotic. Ciprofloxacin and metronidazole constituted 54% of antibiotic prescriptions from general surgery. Amoxicillin/clavulanic acid and ceftriaxone constituted 64.7% of antibiotic prescriptions from neurosurgery, and ceftriaxone and ciprofloxacin made up 37.7% of antibiotic prescriptions from urology. Microbiology testing was done for only 14.5% (9/62) of inpatients who received antibiotics for treatment. The choice of antibiotics was influenced mainly by doctors' previous experience (37/42, 88.1%).

Conclusion: Antibiotics are widely used. About half of all prescriptions had antibiotics, with ciprofloxacin and metronidazole constituting more than half of antibiotic prescriptions from general surgery. Doctors mainly based their antibiotic prescriptions on previous experience and occasionally on microbiological investigations.

Funding: None declared.