Pharmacists and Infection Preventionists: Collaboration on Antimicrobial Stewardship

Collaboration between departments throughout the health care continuum is vital to eliminate unnecessary bacteriuria treatment and, thus, work towards antimicrobial stewardship. A presentation was given at the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) 2023 Annual Conference and Exhibition, held in Orlando, Florida, June 26 to 28, 2023, about how pharmacists and infection preventionists can work together to tackle this challenge.

Maddison B. Stone, MPH, CIC, LSSGB, senior infection preventionist, JPS Health Network, Fort Worth, Texas; and Jordan M. Chiasson, PharmD, BCIDP, clinical pharmacist - antimicrobial stewardship, JPS Health Network, Fort Worth, Texas

The presentation was titled “Reducing Asymptomatic Bacteriuria Treatment–a Collaborative Approach,” and given by Maddison B. Stone, MPH, CIC, LSSGB, senior infection preventionist, JPS Health Network, Fort Worth, Texas; and Jordan M. Chiasson, PharmD, BCIDP, clinical pharmacist - antimicrobial stewardship, JPS Health Network, Fort Worth, Texas. The health care workers spoke with Infection Control Today^® (ICT^®).

ICT: Please tell ICT’s audience about your presentation.

Jordan M. Chiasson, PharmD, BCIDP: Our presentation here focuses on the collaboration between antimicrobial stewardship as a whole [with] pharmacists and infection prevention. We're focusing on reducing asymptomatic bacteria treatment and we're highlighting some of our successes at our hospital. We hope to share some of our experiences with everyone else so that we can provide a model to help out.

ICT: What do you hope the attendees take away from your presentation?

Maddison B. Stone, MPH, CIC, LSSGB: Overall, knowing the importance of appropriate versus inappropriate orderings or cultures and knowing that you do have the power to speak up and to disseminate that to provide the use [of antibiotics].

ICT: What is the biggest challenge today for those in the infection prevention and control field?

MBS: Getting those key stakeholders on board and ensuring that all that key information is disseminated down to those frontline staff.

ICT: What are you most excited about this year’s APIC conference?

JMC: I'm excited as a pharmacist, antimicrobial stewardship, probably being one of the minority [of clinicians not directly in infection prevention] here. So it's really great to meet people from all different professions and different walks of life and get some ideas, networking, and see what other programs are doing and bring that back [to my team] and be an advocate for infection prevention because it's important for those who are not in infection prevention to also recognize how important it is. It's super critical to my role in microbial stewardship, and ultimately downstream to patients as a whole. So I'm really excited to learn from the experts.

MBS: What I am most excited about as well is networking and learning [from] all of these wonderful infection preventionists. Everyone has so much to give, and I'm so excited to take all that information back to the team.