The outpatient module
This new feature was developed following requests of several Global-PPS participants, as patient-level data from the outpatient setting are generally limited. The outpatient module allows institutions to measure antimicrobial use in outpatients, meaning patients who are not admitted overnight. The module is particularly useful for facilities such as outpatient clinics, primary or community healthcare centres and certain hospital departments including emergency, day surgery and outpatient departments.
The advantages of this cross-sectional method include:
- Ease of use
- Collects detailed information
- Minimum workload
- Fast way to quantify and evaluate data
- Follow-up of prescribing behaviours in time
The outpatient module offers a trustworthy way to collect antimicrobial use data in outpatients in high as well as low and middle income countries. Participating institutions receive extensive, high-quality information about prescribing patterns in their outpatient units. Furthermore, the outpatient module supports real-time data collection. In other words, data can immediately be entered in the Global-PPS web application during data collection, consequently speeding up and simplifying data entry.
On top of that, users will be able to generate feedback reports and Excel-files including detailed information about the AWaRe classification and ATC codes of the prescribed antimicrobials. View an example report with fictional data here:
Collecte des données
Collecte des données for outpatient departments includes all outpatients seen during a timeslot of at least half a day on the day of the PPS, whereby brief information is collected for all patients and more detailed data for patients receiving an antimicrobial treatment.
Essential data to collect are the patients’ age category, gender and presenting symptoms. Data on admission status should be additionally collected for emergency and observation departments.
More detailed information should be collected for each patient receiving antimicrobial treatment. This includes information on their specific age and underlying morbidities, as well as treatment-related information, such as:
- the specific antimicrobial agent,
- dose per administration,
- number of doses per day,
- route of administration,
- anatomical site of infection,
- indication of therapy (community- versus hospital-acquired infection or prophylaxis), whether the treatment was based on a Point-of-Care test, Rapid Diagnostic Test or biomarker and
- whether local guidelines are available for the prescribed treatment.
Denominator data are the number of patients that visited the department in the surveyed timeslot on the day of the PPS.
What is the difference with the inpatient module?
The most important difference is that in the inpatient module denominators are collected at ward level, whereas for the outpatient module this happens at patient level. This means that a set of variables is collected for each patient who is seen in the unit during a specific time slot, with more detailed information collected only for patients with an antimicrobial prescription.
Our activities around the world
Pays participant ou inscrits au Global-PPS outpatient module
global-pps-outpatient-worldmap