Today marks the start of the World Antibiotic Awareness Week (WAAW), an annual initiative led by WHO bringing attention to AMR and promoting best practices worldwide. This year’s campaign emphasises the importance of education and taking concrete actions to tackle this critical healthcare challenge.

Meet Shaheen Mehtar, professor of Infection Prevention and Control in South Africa. As a founding member of the Infection Control Africa Network, she has played a pivotal role in shaping infection control practices across the continent. In this interview, Prof. Mehtar discusses her work with the Global Point Prevalence Survey, the successes and challenges of implementing antimicrobial stewardship programs, and her hopes for improving IPC efforts in both hospital and outpatient settings.

Dr. Biljana Carevic, a pioneering hospital epidemiologist, has dedicated her career to infection control and antibiotic stewardship. In this interview, Biljana discusses her work, the challenges of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in Serbia versus Norway, and her ongoing efforts with the Global Point Prevalence Survey.

Last Friday, the annual Global-PPS meeting in collaboration with bioMérieux took place on the occasion of ESCMID Global 2024, formerly known as ECCMID. Over 100 participants attended the hybrid meeting to learn more about the project’s activities, strategies and results. It was a special edition as Global-PPS also celebrated its 10 year anniversary!

A recent study compared antimicrobial prescribing patterns in paediatric patients from three hospitals in Sanandaj, Western Iran, with paediatric patients from hospitals in Southeast Asia and Europe. Standardised 2019 Global-PPS data were used.

Read our interview with Amanda Daniel, Lead Nurse and IPC Specialist from Wales who worked in a Ugandan hospital to help identify antimicrobial prescribing rates. The implementation of the Global-PPS in Uganda highlighted both the challenges and opportunities in addressing AMR and improving infection prevention and control practices.

We interviewed Dr. Herberth Maldonado from Guatemala, who has made great efforts in combatting antimicrobial resistance in his country. He shares his insights and experiences with Global-PPS, what challenges he faces and his hopes for the future.

Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), a tertiary care hospital in Nigeria, is a loyal member in the Global-PPS network with annual multiple participations since 2015. They have been using the Global-PPS data to create a hospital stewardship program and in August 2018, the Nigerian working group on AMS was established.

Launched almost one year ago, the drive-AMS project is gaining significant traction. The project aims to implement antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) programmes in healthcare facilities as an important contribution to the fight against antibiotic resistance.

In June 2024, the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp will be organizing a practical 3-week training on antibiotic resistance and its containment at hospital level in low-resource settings.

Global-PPS is again joining the World Antibiotic Awareness Week, a global campaign improving awareness and understanding of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and encouraging best practices. This year’s theme is again ‘Preventing antimicrobial resistance together’. It focuses on a One Health approach and inspires collaboration across sectors. AMR is a threat to humans, animals, plants and the environment and fighting it is a global endeavour.

Read our interview with Dr. Noritaka Sekiya, a physician for infectious diseases at the Tokyo Metropolitan Cancer and Infectious Diseases Center Komagome Hospital in Japan. He’s working as a consultant in infectious diseases and infection prevention & control. Dr. Sekiya’s other expertise is field epidemiology. In this interview, he addresses the AMR situation in Japan and how using Global-PPS has been a part of tackling this problem.

The Global-PPS tool is continuously improved and expanded. Our newest addition is the interactive reporting dashboard, now available on the online Global-PPS data entry environment. This new feature is meant to replace the longitudinal feedback reports in the pdf-format, and will enable hospitals to customise their analyses.

Read our interview with Professor Gordana Mijovic and Doctor Ivana Djuković, expert members from the Montenegrin Global-PPS network. In this testimonial, they elaborate on the challenges and barriers in the fight against antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the advantages of collaborating with Global-PPS, and the future perspectives of AMR reduction in Montenegro .

Global-PPS is launching a new addition to its web-based tool, namely the outpatient module. This new feature was developed following requests of several Global-PPS participants, as patient-level data from the outpatient setting are generally limited.

This past week, the 33rd European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases, ECCMID, took place in Copenhagen, Denmark. Just as last year, Global-PPS was there to present their findings.

Our Selection of Publications has been updated for 2023. The document presents the Global Point Prevalence Survey, its methodology and facilitating features.

Last week, drive-AMS organised a Training of Trainers Course in Nijmegen, hosted by Radboudumc. The course combined their Dutch AMS Masterclass and the Global-PPS tool and expertise. It was the perfect opportunity to connect, collaborate and exchange ideas!

To strengthen the worldwide response to IFDs and antifungal resistance, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has developed a Fungal Priority Pathogens List (FPPL). Its aim is to focus and drive further research and policy interventions. This list was inspired by the Bacterial Priority Pathogens List that WHO published in 2017.

On 9 December 2022, the World Health Organisation (WHO) published the WHO AWaRe (Access, Watch, Reserve) Antibiotic Book. It is a concise, evidence-based guide for choosing antibiotics, doses, routes of administration and duration of treatment for more than 30 of the most common clinical infections in children and adults, in both primary health care and hospital settings.

On the 1st of November 2022, Radboud University Medical Centre (Radboudumc) and University of Antwerp joined forces to launch drive-AMS, a new project funded under the EU4Health Programme. This project aims to intensify antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) programmes across the European Union by improving prudent antimicrobial use (AMU) and strengthening AMU surveillance, which are both key priorities of the EU One Health Action Plan on AMR.

Every year from 18 until 24 November the World of Antimicrobial Awareness Week (WAAW) takes place. It is a global campaign to improve awareness and understanding of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and encourages best practices among the public, One Health stakeholders, and policymakers. They all play a critical role in reducing the further emergence and spread of AMR.

The Commonwealth Partnerships for Antimicrobial Stewardship (CwPAMS) has published a paper describing the development and implementation of an Antimicrobial Stewardship (AMS) checklist for Sub-Saharan Africa.

Doctor Anthony Enimil is a Paediatric Infectious Disease Specialist, based in the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Ghana. He is also a member of the Hospital Antimicrobial Stewardship Committee. In this interview, Anthony shares his experience with Global-PPS, the advantages of the study and some future challenges.

Doctors Without Borders will soon deploy its innovative Antibiogo application in several of its laboratories in Mali, Jordan, Yemen and the Central African Republic. This free, open source and offline downloadable Android application will contribute to an increase of information technology to support antimicrobial prescribing in low-and middle-income countries (LMIC).

We interviewed Mari Rose De los Reyes, an infectious disease specialist at the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) in Manila, the Philippines. Mari Rose coordinates the national Global-PPS in the country. This network has grown from 16 initial sites to 80 sites all over the Philippines.

Read our unique testimonial with Kate Clezy and Marije Baan from Doctors Without Borders (MSF) about their involvement in Global-PPS.

In May 2022, the Russian network of hospitals within the Global-PPS project published a new paper in the Tropical Medicine and Infectious Disease journal. The goal of the study was to evaluate prescribing patterns of antimicrobials in COVID-19 patients in several Russian multi-field hospitals, and to quantify the prescribing in relation to quality indicators.

At the 32st edition of the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID), the Global-PPS team from the University of Antwerp and participants from Georgia, Montenegro, and the Philippines present their latest Global-PPS results. This year, ECCMID will take place for the first time as a hybrid event both online and on-site in Lisbon, Portugal on 23 – 26 April 2022.

On December 21, 2021, a network of Canadian hospitals published a paper in CMAJ Open, reporting on their Global-PPS results. This study describes antimicrobial use (AMU) based on detailed patient-level data in Canadian hospitals in 2018 in terms of antimicrobial prevalence, indications and agent selection in adult and paediatric medical, surgical and intensive care wards.

Africa CDC (Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention) and CDDEP (Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy) published the first edition of the African antibiotic treatment guidelines for common bacterial infections and syndromes.

The Global-PPS in Iran primarily started in 2015 in the Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences, concurrently with the first global attempt for data collection about antibiotic consumption conducted by the University of Antwerp, Belgium. From 2017, the Global-PPS was repeated every year with additionaldata collected in 4 new hospitals in Sanandaj.

For a long time, the overuse and inappropriate use of both antibiotics and antimalarial drugs has been observed. This poses a threat to the financial situation of this rural hospital. The problem is known, but behavioral change is challenging.

Optimizing antimicrobial prescribing in hospitals through antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) is essential in addressing the threat of antimicrobial resistance. This study reports the results of five consecutive PPS in a private tertiary hospital in the Philippines, using the Global-PPS protocol.

The 31st European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID), will take place in Vienna, Austria from 9 – 12 July 2021. Abstracts can be submitted from 11 January to 24 February 2021.

The Global-PPS team published a paper that focuses on the implementation of antimicrobial stewardship in hospitals in the Global Point Prevalence Survey of Antimicrobial Consumption and Resistance (Global-PPS) network.

Over the past few months, the Global-PPS team has been busy updating the real-time feedback report. They now also provide insight into prevalence’s for the different antibiotic subgroups, healthcare-associated infections and use of invasive devices and the novel WHO AWaRE classification.

When participating in the Global-PPS, online data entry is an important step. We have now created a set of tutorial videos to guide you through the process of online data entry, validation and reporting.

At the 31st edition of ECCMID, Global-PPS participants from Nigeria, Belgium, the Philippines, Cote d’Ivoire, and Iran will present seven abstracts making use of the Global Point Prevalence Survey of Antimicrobial Consumption and Resistance.

On 5 April 2021, the Global-PPS team published a paper in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy that focuses on hospital antibiotic prescribing patterns in adult patients according to the WHO Access, Watch and Reserve classification (AWaRe).

The 31st European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID), will take place in Vienna, Austria from 9 – 12 July 2021. Abstracts can be submitted from 11 January to 24 February 2021.

Dr. Irma Korinteli, a pediatrician and lecturer at Tbilisi State Medical University, has been involved in the Global-PPS project from the very beginning in 2015. Earlier this year, she successfully defended her PhD on antibiotic use in Georgian hospitals. Read her testimonial below!

In 2021, we will launch a series of webinars in which we will introduce the Global-PPS methodology and discuss updates to the protocol and data entry application.

The Global-PPS protocol is adapted to survey COVID-19 patients. The website is translated in French, Japanese, Russian and Spanish. More languages will follow. Read two nice stories on how the Global-PPS is rolled out at national level and how these data can be used for a PhD.

The Global-PPS in Iran primarily started in 2015 in two large Iranian University cities, namely Shiraz and Kurdistan Universities of Medical Sciences, concurrently with the first global attempt for data collection about antibiotic consumption conducted by the University of Antwerp, Belgium.