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Background: Patients admitted to the Intensive care unit (ICU) are seriously ill and often suffer from chronic critical illnesses. These patients receive multiple medications from a variety of pharmacological classes due to life threatening illnesses and nosocomial infections. Meropenem is an antimicrobial agents and one of the most frequently utilized drug in an ICU setting . Appropriate use of antibiotics could be promoted by use of an antibiotic stewardship program like drug utilization evaluation (DUE) with an aim of maximizing the therapeutic response while limiting the unintended side effects. Objective: To evaluate the utilization of meropenem in ICU patients in cardiac center among Sudanese patients. Method: This study was longitudinal observational retrospective study carried in Intensive care unit in cardiac center from 115 patient’s files during the period from September – 2014 to February-2015 . Variables under study include: Clinical use of meropenem, creatinine Clarence of patients, result of bacterial culture test and doses of meropenem used. Results: About 55.65% of patients taking meropenem were female. 56.52 % from the patients presented in ICU taking meropenem their age above 60 years old, Meropenem used for 94.78% of the patients in the study empirically, culture done only for 5.22% of patients before using meropenem. 28.6% from the patients their creatinine clearance half normal between 26- 50 ml/min so they need dose adjustment, 9.5% their creatinine clearance 10-25 ml/min, 9.5% their creatinine clearance 10 ml/min so they need dose adjustment unfortunately there was no dose adjustment seen for these patients this may lead to side effects of meropenem. 76.2% from the patients have therapeutic response after using meropenem. Conclusion: Meropenem use evaluation in this study appears to be inconsistent with evidence based assessment criteria. The most evident inappropriateness was observed when meropenem was used as an empirical therapy. The study also detected other potential problematic areas where concordance with standard guidelines is yet to be achieved. The occurrence of side effects will be due to decline in renal function this suggests the use of therapeutic drug monitoring in routine practice especially in renal compromised patients and this is not done in the patients in ICU.
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