Question: what is a backup prescription

Sinead Balgobin answered on 9 Nov 2015:

A backup prescription is a prescription that will only get you medicine if you are still ill after a few days. You might get a backup prescription if you go to the doctor for an illness caused by bacteria. Bacterial illnesses are treated using antibiotics, but a big problem with this is that bacteria can become resistant to the antibiotics that we have invented/discovered.

Antibiotics are really important. Less than a hundred years ago, people would die from bacterial infections that today we can treat with a short prescription of antibiotics- they are one of the biggest life-saving medicines we have. If bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, that means that they will no longer be killed by them, and we won’t be able to cure bacterial infection any more, which would be awful. Lots of people would be affected by this and probably die.

That’s why scientists and people who work in healthcare are trying to improve how we use antibiotics. One way to reduce the chance of bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics is to use them less, and that idea created the use of backup prescriptions. Instead of giving out antibiotics to everyone who comes in with an infection, doctors ask the patient to wait a few days, and if they don’t get better, then they can get the medicine. Our bodies are quite good at fighting off lots of bacterial infections, like colds, so we shouldn’t overuse antibiotics to make those bacteria or other bacteria become more dangerous.