Antibiotic availability for outpatient treatment of acute peritonitis in chronic peritoneal dialysis patients: A case series

Peritoneal dialysis (PD) is a commonly used form of renal replacement therapy for patients that have reached end-stage renal disease. Acute bacterial peritonitis (ABP) in chronic PD patients results in pain, increased costs, injury to the peritoneal membrane, and PD modality failure. Optimal antibiotic treatment of acute bacterial peritonitis (ABP) in chronic PD patients should be intraperitoneal, outpatient-based, appropriate, prompt, and uninterrupted. We investigated the frequency of and predisposition to suboptimal antibiotic courses for ABP in our chronic PD patients. Twenty-four charts of patients with ABP were reviewed, to test the null hypothesis that all ABP patients received antibiotics optimally. After 12 patient exclusions (hospitalization), 9 suboptimal antibiotic events were detected in 6 of the remaining 12 patients, disproving the null hypothesis (p