Optimising Antimicrobial Use Dashboards
Tackling antimicrobial resistance – the UK five-year national action plan https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-5-year-action-plan-for-antimicrobial-resistance-2019-to-2024 promotes optimal use of antimicrobials in humans to ensure safe and effective patient care by strengthening antimicrobial stewardship programmes which should include the review of dose and duration of antimicrobial prescriptions.
There is also an ambition to reduce UK antimicrobial use in humans by 15% by 2024. Optimising the duration of antibiotic use supports delivery of both these key requirements, and NICE publish antimicrobial stewardship guidance https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/health-protection/communicable-diseases/antimicrobial-stewardship that provides evidence based recommendations for duration of antibiotic use.
These dashboards uses routine primary care antimicrobial prescribing data accessed from NHSBSA ePACT2 analysis to report novel metrics that can be used to optimise duration of antibiotic use in primary care. Metrics have been developed by the NHS England AMR Programme using NICE antimicrobial stewardship guidance content for dose and duration of selected antibiotic formulations.
The 4 dashboards can be viewed below:
