Clinical and Ecological Impact of a Primary Care Antimicrobial Stewardship Program Based on Telematic Educational Interviews. A Cluster Randomized Clinical Trial (TELÉMACO Trial)

The objective of this project is to measure the effect of an Antimicrobial Stewardship Program (ASP) in Primary Care, based on an educational intervention.

This will consist of periodic structured telematic educational interviews between Infectious Diseases experts and Family Medicine and paediatrics specialists. In these interviews, the principles for the optimal use of antimicrobials will be addressed on real cases, analyzing together prescriptions randomly chosen from the Primary Care physician himself.

The repetition over time of key pedagogical messages for the optimisation of prescriptions is expected to improve the quality of antibiotic use, reduce the overall consumption, improve the use of microbiological tests, reduce the incidence of community infections caused by resistant microorganisms, and preserve patients' safety measured by the rate of admission for serious infections.

The results derived from these educational interventions, in the framework of a multimodal ASP, have been evaluated in hospital and Primary Care settings in quasi-experimental studies with a favourable outcome, but not in a clinical trial that specifically assesses the efficacy of educational interviews and avoids the bias of uncontrolled studies. To demonstrate this hypothesis, a cluster randomized trial has been designed, in wich all healthcare centers will be assigned either to a control group (the standard measures defined by the regional ASP PIRASOA will be maintained), and an experimental group (whose physicians will receive the educational intervention described).