2nd ASAP Symposium, presentation #5 is out now: Guidelines for Nursing Homes.

Nursing homes (long-term care facilities) are a specific care context. Not hospitals, and not the community either. Residents are elderly, often frail, frequently carrying urinary catheters or chronic wounds. GPs are not on site. Lab and radiology access is limited. These are conditions that standard guidelines, whether designed for hospitals or for general practice, were not built for.

This is why specific guidelines need to exist for this setting.

Emmanouil Glampedakis presented the development and recent update of antimicrobial prescribing guidelines for nursing homes, a collaborative effort involving 29 contributors from seven cantons and all three linguistic regions.

Among the key evidence-based updates:

• treatment durations have been shortened across infection types
• clinical triggers for suspecting infection in elderly residents used to be a broad range, only confusion is retained
•  a dedicated chapter on vaccination, because prevention is stewardship too.

The full transcript and the link to the guidelines can be found here.