Strategies
Raising awareness (3) among the public and healthcare professionals through campaigns and events can help to educate people to the risks of antibiotic resistance and measures they can take to reduce the risk of it. Since 2008 there has been an European Antibiotic awareness day each year which has been found to be not only successful in raising awareness and changing the behaviour of healthcare professionals and the public in the way that they handle antibiotics but it was also quite cost effective.
Ensuring GPs prescribe antibiotics responsibly to patients through providing resources to help them can help to reduce the over prescription of antibiotics. In 2012 the Health Protection Agency developed a tool called TARGET which would assist GPs in the proper use of antibiotics. Recently the National Institute for Healthcare Excellence has introduced new guidelines (4) to reduce over prescription. These measures include “delayed prescriptions” so that only if the patient does not quickly recover do they redeem their prescription. It has also been made possible for GPs who “dramatically …show more content…
Funding is essential to this so it is important that funding is increased and maintained in the area to support work into finding solutions to antibiotic resistance. From 2010-2014 the spending by the National Institute of Health on antibiotic resistance was $1.7 billion compared to $26.5 billion spent on cancer research (13). This disproportionate allocation of funding demonstrates that, whereas cancer is very important, antibiotic resistance is receiving far too little attention. This imbalance suggests that because the effects of this problem are more subtle they draw less attention. This shows that there is not appropriate focus on antibiotic resistance which is a very important issue that will only worsen without more
Raising awareness (3) among the public and healthcare professionals through campaigns and events can help to educate people to the risks of antibiotic resistance and measures they can take to reduce the risk of it. Since 2008 there has been an European Antibiotic awareness day each year which has been found to be not only successful in raising awareness and changing the behaviour of healthcare professionals and the public in the way that they handle antibiotics but it was also quite cost effective.
Ensuring GPs prescribe antibiotics responsibly to patients through providing resources to help them can help to reduce the over prescription of antibiotics. In 2012 the Health Protection Agency developed a tool called TARGET which would assist GPs in the proper use of antibiotics. Recently the National Institute for Healthcare Excellence has introduced new guidelines (4) to reduce over prescription. These measures include “delayed prescriptions” so that only if the patient does not quickly recover do they redeem their prescription. It has also been made possible for GPs who “dramatically …show more content…
Funding is essential to this so it is important that funding is increased and maintained in the area to support work into finding solutions to antibiotic resistance. From 2010-2014 the spending by the National Institute of Health on antibiotic resistance was $1.7 billion compared to $26.5 billion spent on cancer research (13). This disproportionate allocation of funding demonstrates that, whereas cancer is very important, antibiotic resistance is receiving far too little attention. This imbalance suggests that because the effects of this problem are more subtle they draw less attention. This shows that there is not appropriate focus on antibiotic resistance which is a very important issue that will only worsen without more