114 Chapter 6 Ethical approval Given the anonymous and voluntary aspects of the survey, a declaration of exemption was issued by the institutional review board of Duke University. Definitions Uncomplicated bacteremia was defined as SAB that was not community-acquired, with <48 hours of positive blood cultures under appropriate antibiotic treatment, and no signs of metastatic infections. Oral switch therapy was defined as prescribing at least part of the treatment course orally. Both definitions were provided with the relevant questions. The estimated percentage of SAB patients in whom oral switch therapy was used was defined as never or uncommonly (<20% of SAB patients), sometimes (20%–60% of SAB patients) or frequently (>60% of SAB patients). All questions concerning antibiotic treatment assumed that the isolate was susceptible to the drug. Data collection and management Study data were collected and managed using Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) tools hosted at Duke University [6]. Respondents who completed 0 or 1 question only were removed from the analysis, as well as respondents that did not enter their country of practice. In order to remove potential non-targeted respondents, records were screened for straightliners (respondents that failed to differentiate between response alternatives by, for example, answering always only the first answer, or only the “other” option to every multiple- choice question) and for nonsensical answers to open-ended questions. Because the survey was distributed through different listservs and social media, the number of times the public survey URL link was opened was used to provide the best estimation of the response rate. Statistical analysis Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the data. Data were presented as percentages or proportions of the number of respondents that answered the question for categorical variables, and as medians plus interquartile range (IQR) for continuous variables. Pearson Chi2 tests were performed to analyze differences between continents. All analyses were carried out using SPSS statistics version 28.0.1.1 (IBM Corporation, Armonk, New York, USA).
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