Journal of Applied Pharmacy
Open Access

Impact of Antibiotics on Mental Health

Zimmy Kamal^{* *}Correspondence: Zimmy Kamal, Department of Chemistry, Osaka University, New York, USA, Email:

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Description

The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on clinicians' mental health. When COVID-19 surges overshadow health systems, more than half of health care workers report anxiety about transmitting COVID-19 to family members, concerns about their own health, difficulty balancing childcare and homeschooling, demotivation, and difficulty meeting goal standards of medical care. These ongoing stressors are likely to have an impact on health care workers' ability to provide comprehensive health care.

A retrospective observational study reminds us that, while often unnoticed, depression and anxiety were common among clinicians prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. They looked into data from 1,668 ambulatory visits linked to annual wellness surveys given to clinicians at Boston Medical Center in 2017 and 2018.

They discovered that 34% of clinicians reported depression and/ or anxiety. Furthermore, each standard deviation increase in a clinician's composite depression and anxiety score was associated with a 28% increase in the odds of an inappropriate antibiotic for an Acute Respiratory Tract Infection (ARTI), revealing a troubling link between clinician mental health and antibiotic prescribing. Although the current study was conducted prior to COVID-19, the height of the pandemic, the unique stressors imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic would have shown an even greater prevalence of depression and/or anxiety among clinicians.

For starters, allowing longer patient visits and providing more administrative support may reduce stress among outpatient providers. According to a 2015 survey, the majority of Primary Care Providers (PCPs) in the United States believe they need 18% to 30% more time for each patient than their visit templates allow, highlighting a widespread belief that shorter visits compromise patient care.

PCPs perform a variety of tasks during these brief visits, including navigating complex electronic health records and screening, diagnosing, treating, and preventing disease. Discussions with patients about when antibiotics are unnecessary take time, and PCPs may struggle to provide adequate antibiotic counseling in a brief encounter. Second, lower ratings for patientphysician communication have been linked to physician mental health. Giving doctors’ tools to help them communicate with patients more effectively about the use of antibiotics can increase patient and clinician satisfaction and the compliance of prescribing antibiotics. If patients feel that their doctor is listening to their concerns, they are more likely to accept the idea that antibiotics are not necessary. High visit ratings by patients and families as well as decreased antibiotic use are linked to symptomatic therapy suggestions combined with justifications for why patients don't require antibiotics.

Additionally, the creation of ambulatory Antibiotic Stewardship Programmes (ASPs) can replace the reliance on any one clinician to address difficult antibiotic talks regarding ARTIs with a practice-based strategy. The Joint Commission, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services all suggest using ASPs designed for the ambulatory setting to optimize antibiotic dosing. But there aren't many proven methods for successfully operationalizing ASPs in the outpatient setting. The Safety Program for Improving Antibiotic Use in the Ambulatory Setting, developed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

The Safety Program's main objective was to give frontline clinicians the instruments they needed to incorporate stewardship concepts into regular antibiotic decision making through improving teamwork and communication among practices as well as between health care providers and patients, education on best practices in the diagnosis and treatment of common ambulatory infectious conditions, and establishing the science of safety as an integral component of ASPs. The effect of provider mental health on antibiotic prescribing While the root causes of depression and anxiety among outpatient providers are being researched, relaxing visit time constraints, assisting providers with successful patient communication techniques, and establishing outpatient ASPs may reduce some of the activation of both mental health issues and inappropriate antibiotic prescribing.