Abstract
Objectives: The study is aimed at determining the factors that affect physicians' choices for empiric treatment of community acquired urinary tract infections and assessing the antimicrobial resistance in KKUH during 2013-2014, then correlating physicians' choices with lab susceptibility results. Methods: A cross sectional questionnaire was used and retrospectivee study of lab results of antimicrobial susceptibility test concerning urinary tract infection was carried out. The targeted population was the physicians who were responsible for diagnosing and treating patients with UTIs. Self-administered questionnaire was given to each participant. The first section was designed to investigate factors influencing the physicians' choice of antibiotics; second section of the questionnaire presented two medical cases of UTIs. This was followed by comparing physicians' answers with lab susceptibility results. Sample size was 112 physicians, and 2935 retrospective antimicrobial susceptibility reports. Results: The most important factors taken into consideration are drug contraindication (like pregnancy), mechanism of action, co-exist disease (like renal failure), drug-drug interaction, side effects of antibiotics and patient history of medications, and the least important ones are gender, high, weight, race, socio-economic state and residency. For two clinical cases, results showed that more than 60% of physicians prescribed penicillin or nitrofuran as empiric treatment. Conclusion: The results have shown that the most important factors were contraindication uses, spectrum (wide or narrow) and side effects of antibiotic. And less important were demographic data such as, high, weight, and gender. Unlike our results, the race factor was important factor on choice of antibiotics considering the studies of other countries. Physicians' choice agreed to some extent with antimicrobial susceptibility test results.