Brogan, Autumn

Introduction Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is common and remains the leading infectious cause of death worldwide. Antibiotics remain the mainstay of treatment, but organisms are often not identified, necessitating empirical treatment. Current treatment guidelines recommend combination therapy with beta-lactams and macrolides or monotherapy with fluoroquinolones for non-severe CAP. However, rising antibiotic resistance and safety concerns have led to increased doxycycline use, despite limited evidence supporting its efficacy. Our goal is to conduct a pragmatic, open-label, randomised clinical trial comparing the effectiveness of azithromycin with that of doxycycline in combination with beta-lactam therapy in adult patients hospitalised for CAP. Methods and analysis Patients presenting to the emergency department or directly referred to the hospital with a clinical presentation concerning for CAP and need for hospitalisation are eligible. We plan to enrol 1120 adults hospitalised at six hospitals across four states, including rural, suburban and urban settings and academic and community hospitals. Randomisation will be 1:1 using an electronic health record (EHR)-embedded screening and randomisation tool triggered by the treating clinician’s orders for azithromycin or doxycycline. Outcomes will be ascertained pragmatically via EHR-based data retrieval and will not require additional study visits. Our primary outcome is days alive and out of the hospital through day 28. Secondary outcomes include oxygen-free days; a composite of a need for advanced respiratory support or in-hospital mortality with analyses of each component separately; an ordinal measure of clinical deterioration defined by a prespecified severity scale; and 60-day and 180-day mortality. Safety outcomes are the incidence of Clostridioides difficile infection and QT prolongation. Analyses will follow an intention-to-treat framework, with per-protocol analyses for sensitivity. The primary endpoint will be compared between groups using a stratified van Elteren test, with supportive analyses using proportional odds regression and analysis of covariance adjusted for key covariates. Ethics and dissemination The Mayo Clinic Institutional Review Board reviewed and approved this protocol with a waiver of written consent, requiring verbal consent to be obtained by the clinician initiating the antibiotics (IRB# 24–0 06 503). Findings will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications and international conference presentations. Trial registration number NCT07164131 .

Abstract Rationale Critical care education has been identified as a global priority to improve the early identification and management of common syndromes, including sepsis and respiratory failure. International practice varies widely, and frontline clinical team perspectives remain poorly defined. The CERTAIN (Checklist for Early Recognition and Treatment of Acute Illness and iNjury) program provides a structured, checklist-based approach shown to improve the delivery of best practices and patient-centered outcomes worldwide. Over the past decade we have performed a needs assessment at the start of each international CERTAIN program. We performed a retrospective analysis of these data to examine the critical care domains prioritized by frontline interprofessional teams to inform global training priorities. MethodsWe developed an anonymous online survey consisting of 20 previously defined activities essential to the practice of critical care. Participants ranked these activities using Q-sort methodology on a forced distribution scale from -4 (lowest priority) to + 4 (highest priority). Individual rankings were summed across all participants to generate aggregate scores for each activity, with higher values reflecting greater collective prioritization. Aggregate scores were calculated for the entire cohort and each site and summarized with bar plots to illustrate prioritization patterns across critical care domains. ResultsA total of 213 intensivists, emergency medicine physicians, nurses, and pharmacists from hospitals in China (75), Cambodia (70), Croatia (31), Japan (24) and India (13) completed the survey. The distribution of priorities across content domains is illustrated in Figure. Management of shock, sepsis, mechanical ventilation, and respiratory failure received the highest aggregate scores. Interprofessional critical care coordination was the only process of care activity identified as high priority, and transitions of care, patient centered communication, and shared decision making were consistently ranked lowest. While minor variation existed across individual sites, resuscitation and the acute management of high-risk clinical conditions were consistently prioritized over processes of care and patient-centered care domains. ConclusionThis multicenter analysis demonstrates consistent interprofessional clinician prioritization of acute clinical management topics for training. These insights inform both areas of emphasis and highlight challenges that CERTAIN and other programs face to improve global patient care delivery. Variation in care processes has been consistently identified as the largest modifiable factor to improve patient outcomes, and cultural differences may present barriers to engagement on the best approaches to patient centered care. Figure. Distribution of aggregate Q-sort scores across 20 critical care activities. Scores represent summed participant rankings (n=213) from -4 (lowest priority) to +4 (highest priority). This abstract is funded by: None