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Comment & Response
January 2019

Retail Clinics Provide Important Antibiotic Stewardship—Reply

Author Affiliations
  • 1Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco
  • 2Editor, JAMA Internal Medicine
  • 3Editorial Fellow, JAMA Internal Medicine
  • 4New York City Health and Hospitals, New York, New York
  • 5Deputy Editor, JAMA Internal Medicine
JAMA Intern Med. 2019;179(1):124. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2018.7013

In Reply We appreciate the comments by Munk and Barker regarding about antibiotic stewardship. The rate of inappropriate antibiotic prescribing for respiratory conditions in the study by Palms and colleagues1 likely reflects the fact that some patients may not have sought care at all if not for the easy, same-day access afforded by both retail and urgent care clinics. As the authors of the study note, 17% of visits to retail clinics (53.7% of visits if conditions such as sinusitis and pharyngitis, for which antibiotics are rarely necessary in adults, are included) were for antibiotic inappropriate respiratory conditions—outpacing urgent care centers and higher than the rates of 5% and 6% in emergency department and traditional office visits, respectively.

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