One of the most common indications for a prolonged course of intravenous (IV) antibiotics in children is osteomyelitis. These children often improve rapidly after the first few days of treatment, and then need to either take up a hospital bed, or return frequently for ambulatory injections, with all the cost and disruption which that implies. There has been a trend towards an earlier switch to oral antibiotics for some time, as advocated in a review in this journal.1

A large group of researchers in the US set out to compare outcomes in children who received either continuing …