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ID organizations hold workshop to advance antibiotic stewardship research
Members of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, Infectious Diseases Society of America, Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society and the Society of Infectious Disease Pharmacists gathered with hundreds of health care professionals during a workshop this week to further advance research on antimicrobial stewardship, according to a press release.
The meeting formed a network of health care providers who design, implement, disseminate and assess antimicrobial stewardship projects that aim to reverse the trend of antibiotic resistance.
“What we hope to have is a network of people who are more skilled and can collaborate and know what their resources are for assessing the impact of their stewardship program, which is so needed. We need more data to define what the best practices are,” Infectious Disease News Editorial Board member Elizabeth S. Dodds Ashley, PharmD, MHS, meeting chair and liaison pharmacist with the Duke Antimicrobial Stewardship Outreach Network at Duke University, told Infectious Disease News. “The goal is to really take the frontline stewards — the people who do this day-in and day-out, some of them for decades — and give them the tools needed for assessments beyond some of the comparisons they have been doing for ongoing pragmatic support.”
The workshop largely focused on how health care professionals can assess their stewardship programs at the local level. Dodds Ashley advised researchers to have a clear understanding of what to measure in their stewardship program and how to measure it.
“Think about those things upfront,” she said. “Be really good at defining what your question is so that in the end, you come out with a meaningful set of data that show your local providers and administrators the effect of your program, but also allow it to be more generalizable so that others can share as well.”
Several key discussions included the basics of stewardship research, issues with antibiotic measurement, and the role sociobehavioral factors in antibiotic prescribing.
“We heard time and time again, it’s not just about people not knowing the guidelines,” Dodds Ashely said. “When we study our stewardship interventions, we need to study why they work and why the behavioral change, which is such a key element of stewardship program, can help lead the successes. We think that often our interventions don’t work because we haven’t put the right people skills behind them, so studies related to that will be helpful.”
Disclosure: Dodds Ashley reports no relevant financial disclosures.