Something as simple as effective cleaning and hand hygiene can have a demonstrable impact on the quality of patient safety.
For our part, Challenge Works is incentivising developers to create diagnostic tests that enable accurate and affordable testing. The £8 million Longitude Prize will be awarded to test developers that create a rapid test designed to curb the unnecessary use and misuse of precious antibiotics. Globally, there are teams of medical and science innovators that are developing diagnostics that have the potential to transform the way doctors treat infections, from cameras that compare a single image of an infection against an AI enabled database, to chips that plug into smartphones to analyse specks of blood for infection. Rather than three days, they offer the prospect of providing accurate diagnoses within 30 minutes.
The PHE data shows us that though the proportion of infections becoming drug resistant has not increased, the total number of infections has. As such, we must also double-down on infection prevention and control programmes (IPC) in all health and social care settings and break the chain of infection. Something as simple as effective cleaning and hand hygiene can have a demonstrable impact on the quality of patient safety across the health system.
Though it is said that “awareness does not seem to translate easily into changing use behaviour” [3 – below] it is also an essential part of the puzzle. Commenting on the launch of the PHE report and battle with AMR, Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, Chair of the Royal College of GPs, rightly acknowledges that: “GPs are already doing a good job at reducing antibiotic prescribing, but it can’t be our responsibility alone.”
Ultimately, if we continue on this path of limited interventions and wishful thinking for a “silver bullet” solution, like the reduction of prescriptions or the introduction of a new antibiotic, without driving wider system change in other areas, clinicians will continue to remain stuck between superbugs and a hard place.
If we are really serious about preserving antibiotics so that we don’t return to the pre-antibiotic age, prescribing “just in case” is no longer an option. Clinicians need new diagnostic tools to prescribe antibiotics with certainty.
REFERENCES
- https://www.gov.uk/government/news/165-new-antibiotic-resistant-infections-every-day-in-england
- https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/32552
- https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/publications/research/2019-10-11-AMR-Full-Paper.pdf