Prophylactic and Empiric Antibiotic Therapy: In a Nutshell (Nursing)

00:01 Okay, so let's talk about the most important points that you need to know as a nurse in being part of the team that selects the most effective antibiotic for your patient.

00:11 So we had the narrow spectrum and the broad spectrum.

00:14 Narrow-spectrum antibiotics treat a smaller number of types of bacteria.

00:19 Broad-spectrum antibiotics treat a wider range of types of bacteria, but -- the sad news is they promote microbial resistance.

00:29 So, your job is to make sure that we can get the patient on the most narrow spectrum that's still effective to treat the bacteria, in collaboration with your healthcare provider.

00:40 We talked about a way to categorize antibiotics that just lets you know, kind of, how things are laid out in this course, we use their mechanism of action.

00:49 We initially talked about 7 of them, but we're really looking at the 4 main ones as we go through the rest of the course.

00:55 We talked about the difference between prophylactic and empirical antibiotics.

01:00 Remember, prophylactic antibiotics is you don't have an infection yet, but we're going to put you in a situation that puts you at a risk to have an infection, like surgery or a dental procedure.

01:10 So, we're going to give you an antibiotic when you don't have an infection because we want to prevent the chance or minimize the risk of you developing one.

01:18 Now empiric therapy is -- yeah, sad news.

01:21 You have an infection, but we don't know exactly what bugs are causing it, so what we're going to do is give you our best clinical educated guess, until we get those culture and sensitivity reports back, and we'll put you on a more narrow spectrum antibiotic after then.

01:37 The effectiveness of the antibiotic therapy is evaluated by looking for clinical signs that the infection is resolving, so less redness, less pain, less swelling, less fever, and a normal white blood cell count.

01:51 Well, that wraps up everything you need to know that you can start to put into clinical practice for learning how to make sure your patient is on the most effective antibiotic.