Community-based antibiotic delivery for possible serious bacterial infections in neonates in low- and middle-income countries.

CONCLUSIONS: Low-quality data demonstrated that community-based antibiotics reduced neonatal mortality when compared to the standard hospital referral for neonatal PSBI in resource-limited settings. The use of co-interventions, however, prevent disentanglement of the contribution from community-based antibiotics. Moderate-quality evidence showed that simplified, community-based treatment of PSBI using regimens which rely on the combination of oral and injectable antibiotics did not result in increased neonatal mortality when compared to the standard treatment of using only injectable antibiotics. Overall, the evidence suggests that simplified, community-based antibiotics may be efficacious to treat neonatal PSBI when hospitalisation is not feasible. However, implementation research is recommended to study the effectiveness and scale-up of simplified, community-based antibiotics in resource-limited settings. PMID: 30970390 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Cochrane Database Syst Rev Source Type: research