Guidance
This guideline covers diagnosing and managing community- and hospital-acquired pneumonia in adults. It aims to improve accurate assessment and diagnosis of pneumonia to help guide antibiotic prescribing and ensure that people receive the right treatment.
Recommendations
This guideline includes recommendations on:
- when to consider a C-reactive protein test to guide treatment
- assessing severity of community-acquired pneumonia
- antibiotic therapy for community-acquired pneumonia
- monitoring and discharge from hospital
- antibiotic therapy for hospital-acquired pneumonia
Who is it for?
- Healthcare professionals
- People who have pneumonia, their families and carers
Guideline development process
How we develop NICE guidelines
Next review date: 2018
Your responsibility
The recommendations in this guideline represent the view of NICE, arrived at after careful consideration of the evidence available. When exercising their judgement, professionals are expected to take this guideline fully into account, alongside the individual needs, preferences and values of their patients or service users. The application of the recommendations in this guideline is not mandatory and the guideline does not override the responsibility of healthcare professionals to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual patient, in consultation with the patient and/or their carer or guardian.
Local commissioners and/or providers have a responsibility to enable the guideline to be applied when individual health professionals and their patients or service users wish to use it. They should do so in the context of local and national priorities for funding and developing services, and in light of their duties to have due regard to the need to eliminate unlawful discrimination, to advance equality of opportunity and to reduce health inequalities. Nothing in this guideline should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with compliance with those duties.
Commissioners and providers have a responsibility to promote an environmentally sustainable health and care system and should assess and reduce the environmental impact of implementing NICE recommendations wherever possible.