Australian dentists write around 70,000 prescriptions for antibiotics each month. And medical practitioners are also prescribing antibiotics for dental problems. But how many of those prescriptions are actually necessary, and are we contributing to antimicrobial resistance.

This week is World Antimicrobial Resistance Awareness Week, a global campaign to raise awareness and understanding of AMR and promote best practices to reduce the emergence and spread of drug-resistant infections. Antimicrobial resistance is already affecting the care of patients, and current trends
indicate AMR will have an increasing impact over time. The World Health Organisation has described AMR as one of the greatest threats to human and animal health, as well as food and agriculture. Each year, hundreds of people die in Australia as a result of antimicrobial resistance. 

“If we use antibiotics when not needed, we may not have
them when they are most needed.”  -Tom Frieden, MD, Former
Director U.S. CDC

Antibiotics prescribed by dentists account for a significant 10 per cent of all antibiotics prescribed worldwide, but up to 55 per cent of those antibiotics are prescribed unnecessarily by dentists in Australia.

In this episode of Dental As Anything we talk to dentist and
pharmacist Leanne Teoh about the issues of antimicrobial resistance and prescribing. Leanne works both clinically as a dentist and also as a researcher at the Melbourne Dental School. In collaboration with MIMS Australia she has commercialised the first clinical decision medicines tool for dental practitioners in Australia, called MIMS Drugs4dent®, and she has co-authored the Australian national dental guidelines, Therapeutic Guidelines Oral and Dental Version 2.

Further Resources

FDI World Dental Federation white paper ‘The essential role of the dental team in reducing antibiotic resistance’

FDI World Dental Federation MOOC - Tackling Antibiotic Resistance: What Should Dental Teams Do?