摘要：An electronic network of Australian microbiology laboratories was established to monitor theemergence and occurrence of antimicrobial resistance among clinically relevant bacteria. It isbelieved that the data network collected approximately 42 per cent of all antibacterial susceptibilitytest results generated by Australian laboratories. The network comprised 94 hospitals and 9 privatecommercial laboratories. Selected data elements were extracted and electronically transmitted to acentral location. Upon receipt, all data were first normalised and thereafter examined for errors.Duplicate results for the same patient were identified to prevent skewing of the data towardresistance. All data passing quality assessment was staged for release of a new database release thatoccurred monthly. Unusual test results were first validated prior to their inclusion into the database.Using an Internet-based query tool, individual institutions could query their own data, but could onlyquery aggregated data for other regional or national analyses. Individual patient results could beexamined nor could the results of any individual institution other than their own. As of March 2002,TSN Database Australia contained 14,648,752 test results, from 2,000,394 strains (453 differenttaxa) and 1,213,605 patients. Since the same database concept has been established in 10 othercountries (United States of America, Europe, and Canada), observations made in Australia may becompared to those observed elsewhere in the world. This article will describe TSN in greater detail,describe the query tool and some of the analyses that are possible
