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Antimicrobial therapy in emergency departments (EDs) is usually empiric in nature. Due to workload and a goal to reduce patient wait times, providers often make rapid decisions regarding antibiotic prescriptions for discharge. A review of current empiric prescribing practices would determine the appropriateness of oral antibiotic discharge prescriptions from EDs. A single-center retrospective electronic health record review of all adult patients with an ED visit from 1 June 2019, to 30 June 2021 who received at least one oral antibiotic prescription at discharge from Baptist Memorial Hospital-Golden Triangle was conducted. The primary outcome was the assessment of appropriate antibiotic discharge prescriptions. The parameters for appropriateness included empiric drug selection, dosage, frequency, duration, and subsequent cultures and sensitivities. Of the 18,289 identified records, 421 patients were randomly sampled with 400 patients included in the final analysis. Of these, 190 (47.8%) discharge oral antibiotic prescriptions were assessed as appropriate and 209 (52.3%) discharge oral antibiotic prescriptions were assessed as inappropriate based on the guideline recommendations. With approximately half of the patients receiving discharge antibiotics that did not fully follow the guideline recommendations, there is a need for provider education, pharmacist intervention, and antimicrobial stewardship programs focusing on this practice. Full article

On February 8, 1971, Michel Foucault announced the formation of Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons (the Prisons Information Group [GIP]), a group of activist intellectuals who worked to amplify the voices of those with firsthand knowledge of the prison—reflected in their motto, “Speech to the detainees!” In highlighting and circulating subjugated knowledges from within prisons, the GIP not only pursued political and material interventions, but also called for epistemological and methodological shift within intellectual labor about prisons. This essay turns to the work of the GIP, and philosophical reflection on that work, as a resource for contemporary theological methodology. Counter to the optimistic and positive trend in theological turn to practices, this essay draws on Foucault’s work with and reflection on the GIP to argue for a negative theology of practice, which centers on practice (those concrete narratives found in any lived theological context) while, at the same time, sustaining its place in the critical moment of self-reflection; this means theology exposes itself to the risk of reimagining, in the double-movement of self-critique and other-reponse, what theology is. In order to harness and tap into its own moral, abolitionist imagination, this essay argues that theology must risk (paradoxically) and pursue (ideally) its own abolition—it must consider practices outside of its own theological and ecclesial frameworks as potential sources, and it must attend closely, critically, and continually to the ways that Christian practices, and accounts of them, perpetuate and produce harm. Full article