A Critical Contrast: Washington State's Case for Critical Access Hospital Benchmarks.

This article discusses the challenges faced by critical access hospitals (CAHs) in implementing antimicrobial stewardship (AS) programs. The authors analyzed Washington state-specific data from the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) annual hospital survey to assess the AS performance of CAHs compared to acute care hospitals (ACHs). The results showed that CAHs had lower implementation rates for most AS components compared to ACHs. The authors emphasize the importance of providing facility-specific benchmarks and stratifying data by facility type and geographic location to support health equity efforts and improve AS in CAHs. [Extracted from the article]