Clinician-targeted interventions can reduce antibiotic prescribing for ARIs

Moderate-quality evidence suggested the following interventions are likely to have an important effect on reducing antibiotic prescribing:

C-reactive protein point-of-care testing in general practice (with no differences in symptom duration, patient satisfaction or reconsultation)

shared decision-making in general practice (while maintaining patient satisfaction and without increasing likelihood of reconsultation)

procalcitonin-guided management in general practice and emergency departments (without affecting health-related quality of life and while avoiding treatment failure).

The quality of the evidence for strategies aimed to educate doctors about antibiotic prescribing, that provide decision aids for doctors to help them change their prescribing, and for the use of rapid viral diagnostics in emergency departments, was either low or very low, meaning that it was not possible to draw firm conclusions about the effects of these strategies