Quick antibiotic delivery reduces intensive care needs

“Another thing we show is that just increasing the awareness of how important it is to get antibiotics on board quickly in these cases speeds delivery,” Dr Hilden said.

This knowledge and the aforementioned interventions allowed the researchers to reduce the time to antibiotic delivery to a median of 46 minutes.

“Only 11% of pediatric cancer patients with fever and neutropenia have serious complications,” Dr Hilden noted. “That’s low, but we can make it 0%, and this study shows that getting antibiotics onboard quickly goes a long way toward that goal.”