[Evaluating care in community acquired pneumonia].
BACKGROUND
Evaluations of care strategies for patients with community acquired pneumonia (CAP) tend to focus more on their necessity (variation in practice...) than on efficacy (adherence, impact of markers of disease severity or medico-economic factors...).


BACKGROUND
A number of studies are reported in the literature based on a simple evaluation of practice at a given moment on time or else on the impact of guidelines. These evaluations relate either to outcome criteria (mortality, and duration of stay especially) or the economic impact of CAP (rate of hospitalization, duration of stay, costs of the treatments or hospitalizations...), or on process of care (evaluation of initial severity, delay in administration of antibiotics, appropriateness of antibiotic therapy, evaluation of oxygenation and taking of specimens prior to treatment).


CONCLUSIONS
Taken together these studies demonstrate the need to improve and standardise care. Where studies have not found a benefit from guidelines this can often be attributed to problems with assessment or study design and there are many studies showing the benefit of guideline based management and the introduction of standardised care pathways.
Benhamou
D
D
Service de Pneumologie, Hôpital de Bois-Guillaume, CHU, Rouen, France. daniel.benhamou@chu-rouen.fr
D017714:Community-Acquired Infections / Q000628:therapy; D005602:France; D006801:Humans; D011014:Pneumonia / Q000628:therapy*; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D011787:Quality of Health Care