Article Text

Download PDFPDF
Letters
Neonatal vancomycin trough level audit using British National Formulary for Children dosing
  1. Kate Petrie1,
  2. Claire O'Brien1,
  3. Shetty Bhushan2,
  4. Antonella Tonna3
  1. 1 Pharmacy Department, Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, UK
  2. 2 Neonatal Unit, Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, UK
  3. 3 School of Pharmacy and Life Sciences, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK
  1. Correspondence to Kate Petrie, Pharmacy Department, Ninewells Hospital, Dundee DD1 9SY, UK; k.e.cathcart{at}rgu.ac.uk

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

Neonatal vancomycin target trough levels are not always achieved, thus increasing the risk of morbidity and mortality due to treatment failure. The British National Formulary for Children (BNFc) dosing guidance is widely used despite there being no evidence of it achieving target trough levels.1 Within the UK, Kadambari et al 1 found that 79% of surveyed neonatal units use the BNFc vancomycin dosing. In 2007, the BNFc changed the target trough recommendations from 5–10 mg/L to 10–15 mg/L due to increasing resistance, but did not change the dosage recommendations.1 Neonates are potentially being under-dosed after 2007. The BNFc dosing is based on corrected gestational age (CGA) and weight, with the dosing being 15 mg/kg …

View Full Text

Footnotes

  • Competing interests None.

  • Ethics approval NHS Tayside R&D, East of Scotland Research Ethics Service.

  • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.