A project group including various partners (Birmingham City Council, Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust, Birmingham CrossCity CCG, Aston University) to educate children in the city about antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The school focused activity centered on a city wide poster competition for school age children from Year 3 up to Sixth Form. They were asked to design a poster containing the key messages of the World Health Organisation WAAW campaign.
The next phase has involved developing interactive sessions that can be delivered as either a lesson or assembly across Primary and Secondary schools in Birmingham to raise awareness of AMR. Our ambition is to focus on areas of poor health outcomes and poor prescribing.
The assemblies will be piloted this year, in the near future, they will be part of a rolling programme that will be delivered by Aston University students on health care programmes as part of their professional development. This peer approach is innovative and contributes not only to the awareness in the age group targeted but develops the skills and understanding of the undergraduate students who are future healthcare professionals and it also allows sustainability of the project long-term.
This project has set out to tackle AMR by educational intervention. It is important to change attitudes, behaviours and expectations of the next generation as they are the future decision makers. These children will educate their families, in turn reducing the demand of antibiotics.
Within the CCG I had good links with hospital microbiologists, Public Health at the Birmingham City Council , good relationship with Diane Ashiru-Oredope- National Lead WAAW, EAAD & Antibiotic Guardian Campaign. I was put in touch with NHS BANES who had done poster competition before and Dr Allison from Manchester University who had done some outreach work in secondary schools around pharmacy as a degree and AMR. I also had supported Aston University with an AMR play, and brought the AMR lead in to the project group.
Before I started the project, it was always my aim to ensure the project could be delivered long-term, involving Aston University and their students would allow this to happen. This gave me ideas and I brought a project group together (from partners named above) with the hope to deliver a joint vision. The working partnerships has been integral to the success of this project, everyone's contribution has helped piece the jigsaw together as everyone comes with their own expertise.
Success will be fully measured as we roll out the educational assemblies, as we will be recording the impact of the children's knowledge and understanding and if they retained the information after a longer period of time. Once this project is completed we hope to create a project pack so others can role out similar work packages.
The project has raised awareness about AMR among school age children, in our target cohort. This is part of an ongoing programme of activity that will eventually have reach across all the poor health outcomes areas in our City. In addition through the health promotion work of Aston MPharm students in partnership with GP practices and two hospital trusts during World Antibiotic Awareness Week has developed skills in these future pharmacists to equip them for stewardship in their careers.
Everyone will benefit from this project; public, healthcare professionals and students
During each phase we have measured different outcomes;
Phase 1: AMR in schools poster competition – we were able to contact 100 schools across Birmingham and promote the poster competition. We received 30 entries across the schools, and on reflection we should have approached schools earlier in the year. We measured social media reach pre and during the competition launch and my Twitter account showed a total of 7443 impressions on and a total of 295 engagements.
Phase 2: World Antibiotic Awareness Weeks- including events at Aston University, awards ceremony for poster competition and GP stands to promote antibiotic awareness in poorer performing practices. A total number of 289 members of the public were spoken to during the week at the stands manned by students, over Twitter activity showed reach of 33,651.
Phase 3: AMR in school interactive assemblies. We are currently in the process of piloting assemblies and we will be measuring understanding and impact of the children- pre- assembly, straight after the assembly, 2 weeks after the assembly and then 12 weeks after the assembly.
Difficulties that we have faced have been getting initial engagement from schools, but we are now working on getting in to head-teacher meeting that are held in each areas and presenting what we would like to deliver.
