The suggested criteria for antimicrobial step-down include:
The patient is improving clinically (i.e. afebrile for at least 24 hours, leukocytes normalizing, hemodynamically stable, improvement in status of infection and not septic).
The patient has a functional GI tract, is able to take oral or NG nutrition and/or medications and there is no evidence of malabsorption.
The pathogen is not known to be resistant to the antimicrobial to be used.
The patient does not fall under the parameters of exclusion
