Behavioural approaches to optimise antibiotic stewardship in hospitals

Activity

With the funding received from the Research Council of Norway (RCN) through the Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance (JPIAMR) under the fourth call (2016), we've established a multidisciplinary behavioural approach working group. This conference served an opportunity to disseminate related outputs among other working groups, funded through that call. Prof. Craig Ramsay, the HSRU's director, presented on behalf of our working group.

Description

Antibiotic stewardship is a key strategy to prevent antibiotic resistance and reduce healthcare associated infections. There is robust evidence to show that a variety of stewardship interventions are effective in reducing unnecessary treatment safely, without increase in mortality. However, stewardship efforts require health professionals to change their behaviour and it is uncertain the extent to which the substantial theoretical and empirical framework in behavioural sciences about how to change behaviour has been applied to stewardship programmes. Our working group brought together world experts in antibiotic stewardship with experts in implementation science and behaviour change to address:
1. What behaviour change approaches can be recommended now to optimise hospital stewardship programmes?
2. How can hospital stewardship programmes be designed to optimise implementation across countries?
3. What is the research agenda to optimise efficient implementation of hospital antibiotic stewardship programmes worldwide?

Period	9 Mar 2018
Event title	Fourth JPIAMR Call Conference: Maximising existing and future research efforts and resource alignment to combat AMR
Event type	Conference
Location	Frankfurt, Germany
Degree of Recognition	International