The Appropriateness of Using Cefazolin as a Surgical Prophylaxis Antibiotic

For the majority of surgeries, cefazolin is the drug of choice for prophylaxis because it is exten-sively studied and has a proven efficacy. The present study was a retrospective study that was conducted in a hospital in Riyadh province to describe the appropriateness of using cefazolin as a surgical prophylaxis antibiotic among the patients who had a surgery in the hospital. Most of the patients in the present study received incorrect dose of cefazolin (95.65%). More than 39% of the patients received cefazolin for 3 days and only 8.70% of the patients received appropriate duration. The present study showed that the adherence to the surgical antibiotic prophylaxis guideline was low and demonstrated a wide gap between the recommen-dations of the international and national guideline and hospital practice. So, many interventions including educational interventions are needed to improve the use of antibiotic as recommended by the guidelines.