A team of researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have developed a tool that they say can reliably assess awareness of antibiotic resistance (ABR) among human and animal healthcare professionals.
In a study published today in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, the researchers describe the design, testing, and analysis of a self-administered questionnaire that included an ABR awareness module with 23 items under four domains: mechanisms of ABR, antibiotic use as a driver of resistance, transmission and infection control of ABR, and detection and recognition of ABR. The questionnaire was completed by human and animal healthcare professionals trained to prescribe and dispense antibiotics in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Vietnam, Thailand, and Peru.
Overall, 941 healthcare professionals (625 human and 316 animal) were included in the study. Median ABR awareness scores were 54.6 to 63.5 for human healthcare professional and 55.2 to 63.8 for animal healthcare professionals (on a scale of 0 to 100). Physicians and veterinarians scored higher than other healthcare professionals in every country tested.
Around two thirds of respondents felt the information they received on ABR was not adequate to inform their day-to-day practice, and most respondents felt they had inadequate access to local ABR patterns. More than 95% of human healthcare professionals said they were interested in receiving information or training on ABR and antimicrobial stewardship.
The study authors note that while better ABR awareness levels may not necessarily correlate with better antibiotic prescribing practices, they are a prerequisite for the success of behavioral interventions around antibiotic use, and therefore it is "crucial to design a tool that enables such a measurement."
"This tool could be used to direct and track interventions to improve [antimicrobial resistance] awareness and to ascertain the success of these interventions, enabling cost-effectiveness evaluations," they wrote.