Table 7.

Physicians practice after starting antibiotics.

QUESTIONS	NUMBER (%)
In general, how long does it take to get results from your microbiology department?
• 0–3 days	46 (50%)
• 4–7 days	40 (43%)
• 1–2 weeks	7 (7%)
In a patient who is responding clinically to current antibiotic therapy, what is your response to a culture report that indicates the organisms isolated are resistant to that antibiotic regime?
• I change to appropriate antibiotics based on the report	57 (61%)
• I continue the present antibiotics	29 (31%)
• I add one of the susceptible antibiotics to the current regime	7 (8%)
If the culture report shows an isolate that is sensitive to my current antibiotics, but also to a narrower-spectrum antibiotic
• I continue present therapy	35 (38%)
• I change to the narrow-spectrum antibiotic	58 (62%)
In your practice, how often would you say that your empiric coverage correlated with susceptibility reports from the microbiology laboratory?
• Often	15 (16%)
• Somewhat often	35 (38%)
• Sometime	33 (36%)
• Rarely	4 (4%)
• Extremely rarely	1 (1%)
• Never checked/not sure	5 (5%)