Sanford Guide Like Antibiotic Tables
Sanford Guide style tables showing which drugs cover which bugs. Useful on the nights your pocket guide is in your other white coat.
Three printable charts, split by drug class. Each one maps the antibiotic against the organisms it reliably covers, so you can see at a glance where your empiric choice has a hole in it.
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PDFAntibiotics 1
Penicillins, aminopenicillins, antistaphylococcal penicillins, antipseudomonal agents, carbapenems and fluoroquinolones.
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PDFAntibiotics 2
Cephalosporins, oral and intravenous, across all generations.
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PDFAntibiotics 3
Aminoglycosides, macrolides, ketolides, tetracyclines, glycylcyclines, glycopeptides, urinary tract agents and miscellaneous drugs.
Coverage tables tell you what a drug can do in principle. They cannot tell you what the organisms in your hospital are actually doing. Local resistance patterns vary enormously between institutions and change year to year, so pair these charts with your own antibiogram and your pharmacy's guidance before you commit to an empiric regimen.
How to use these on the wards
Start from the syndrome, not the drug. Decide what you are treating and which organisms plausibly cause it, then look across the table and find the agent that covers all of them with the narrowest spectrum you can get away with. Broad coverage on night one is reasonable. Staying broad on night four, after the cultures have spoken, is not.
For dosing, renal adjustment and interactions, use the drug guide.