Best Assessment of Sore Throat and Antibiotic Prescribing

Today patients appear either at a PHC centre or at the Pharmacy. The Pharmacy may provide advice on analgesic or refer the patient to a PHC centre. At the PHC centre, the patient may first appear to the medical practitioner or a nurse pending on local routines. The current Swedish guideline recommends no antibiotics and no testing for patients with 0-2 Centor criteria. For patients with 3-4 Centor criteria the guideline recommends testing and only consider antibiotics if GAS is present.

COVID-19 has gradually transformed from expressing itself as a severe lower respiratory tract infection to be more of an upper respiratory tract infection. Furthermore, COVID-19 is likely to transform from a pandemic to an endemic state with a low continuous incidence. Hence, in response to COVID-19 it seems crucial to identify to what extent the common sore throat is caused by the SARS-CoV-2.

Furthermore, a large controlled clinical trial is required to sort out if patients attending with a sore throat as the main complaint are best managed by medical practitioners, nurses or pharmacists. This study aims to perform such a controlled clinical trial comparing the outcome of sore throat patients management by medical practitioner, nurses and pharmacists. This study also aims to investigate to what extent the SARS-CoV-2 virus is identified in these patients.

Inclusion criteria

• The patient is contacting/attending PHC centre or Pharmacy presenting with a sore throat as the main complaint.
• Male or female, aged ≥6 years.
• Fluent in Swedish (reading, writing, conversational) (applicable to caregivers/parents/guardians in case of children).
• Mental state such that he or she can understand and give informed consent to participation in the study by signing the Information and Consent Form.
• Provision of signed and dated Informed Consent Form.

Exclusion criteria

• The illness episode is classified as potentially complicated or potentially critically ill
• Presence of SARS-CoV-2 virus in a patient first appearing at the PHC in a cluster where the assessment is supposed to be done by the pharmacists. The patient will not be sent to the pharmacist in case of presence of SARS-CoV-2-virus.
• Patient request to be withdrawn from the study.