Background The inappropriate and abusive use of antibiotics (ATB) is causing a serious global health problem consisting of the appearance, more and more frequently, of bacterial strains resistant to them.

Purpose Detect and classify interventions related to antibiotherapy, as well as analyse and quantify the pharmaceutical contributions made in a third-level hospital.

Material and methods Retrospective, observational, descriptive study of all interventions related to antibiotics registered from September 2016 to September 2017 with Athos-APDÒ software. Inclusion criteria were patients older than 18 years who received ATB during an admission in the study period. The variables studied were: number of patients treated, number of antibiotic interventions, description of intervention performed, medical services involved, and pharmaceutical contributions and interventions accepted/rejected by the prescriber. The Office^® software package was used to process the data.

Results A total of 257 antibiotic-related interventions were obtained for a total of 230 patients. Of these, 102 were for levofloxacin, 32 amoxicillin-clavulanate, 28 meropenem, 20 ciprofloxacin, 10 ceftriaxone and 65 for the rest of ATB. Ninety-six per cent of interventions were accepted and corrected by the prescriber and 4% were rejected. The ‘Sequential therapy’ was the type of intervention mostly made (77 interventions) followed by ‘Excessive duration of treatment’ (50), ‘Dose Adjustment/recommended schedule’ (37), ‘Interaction/Incompatibility’ (23), ‘Modification via administration’ (17), ‘Prescription/transcription error’ (13), ‘Conciliation’ (nine) and ‘Allergies/Inadequate selection’ (eight).

The most intervened medical services were: internal medicine (68), pneumology (36), general surgery (24), infectious (21) and digestive (20). The most frequent pharmaceutical contributions were: correction of dosage errors (amoxicillin/clavulanate 2 g, ceftriaxone and vancomycin); notification cross allergies (cephalosporins-amoxicillin/clavulanate and penicillin-imipenem), therapeutic doubling communication, suspension recommendation for more than 15 days of treatment (imipenem, levofloxacin, linezolid or meropenem), drug interaction notification (ceftriaxona-acenocumarol or levofloxacin-rivaroxaban) and non-pharmacological (ciprofloxacin-enteral diet) and recommendation for oral change (levofloxacin or linezolid)

Conclusion According to the results obtained, the interventions and contributions made by the pharmacist granted correction of prescription errors and, consequently, contributed to improving the use of antibiotic therapy.

No conflict of interest