Antibiotic stewardship · evidence checklist
A stewardship story needs the official source that matches its claim: surveillance for measured patterns, program guidance for implementation, and clinical guidance for care standards. One source type cannot silently stand in for another.
Match the source to the sentence
CDC’s Antibiotic Prescribing and Use collection separates public education, professional materials, core stewardship elements, prescribing data and condition-specific clinical resources. That structure is useful because each family answers a different question.
A national prescribing display can support a claim about the measure and population shown. It cannot establish why a particular prescription was written. A core-elements document can describe components of a stewardship program, but it does not prove that a named facility implemented them or improved outcomes.
Five fields every claim needs
- Object: antibiotic use, resistance, program activity or clinical guidance.
- Population and setting: people, isolates, facilities, prescriptions or claims.
- Measure: count, rate, percentage, DOT, SAAR or another defined unit.
- Period and geography: the source’s actual coverage.
- Version: publication date, methodology and retrieval date.
Policy reporting may explain how use is measured and improved. It must not infer a diagnosis, antibiotic choice, dose or duration for a reader. Those decisions require individualized clinical evaluation.
Source-order workflow
Begin with the agency’s current topic page, then open the exact dataset, protocol, recommendation or report. Save the title, date and methodology. If a secondary summary points to an official record, cite the record. If definitions changed, describe the break rather than presenting a continuous trend.
What editors can verify next
Before publication, test every link and confirm the claim appears in the cited source. Ask whether the evidence describes use, appropriateness, resistance or outcomes—four different questions. A clear limitation is more useful than a confident conclusion the source cannot support.