Methodological validation of monitoring indicators of antibiotics use in hospitals.

Background: For several years now, the French national recommendations have been trying to set up a surveillance system in hospitals to link data on antibiotic resistance and data on the use of antibiotics, particularly for certain ‘micro-organism/antibiotic’ pairs. The indicators recommended in the lastest newsletter of the Direction Generale de la Sante (French Public Health Department) for monitoring the consumption of antibiotics were the number of days of treatment or the number of defined daily doses (DDD), both (in)directly related to the number of days of hospitalisation and/or the number of patients hospitalised.