Introduction
PROLIFERATION, COMPLICATIONS
Unnecessary use of antibiotics is associated with the needless development and proliferation of antimicrobial resistance.Previous qualitative research has also shown that clinicians prescribe antibiotics “just in case” to mitigate perceived risk of future hospital admission and complications,In an attempt to reduce “just in case” prescribing, we previously developed and internally validated the STARWAVe prognostic algorithm, which uses seven clinical characteristics to stratify children’s risk of hospital admission in the following 30 days into “very low,” “normal,” and “high” risk (bootstrapped area under the receiver operating characteristic curve 0.81). Children in the very low risk stratum have a 0.3% (95% confidence interval 0.2% to 0.4%) post-test probability of needing hospital treatment in the following 30 days and thus are unlikely to need antibiotics.