A quick win from India

Hello, and welcome to Quick Win 2. This Quick Win is entitled, preparation and dissemination of antibiotic policy guidelines in hospital settings and the role of online access as a quick win strategy for antimicrobial stewardship. My name is Sujith Chandy, and I welcome you to this Quick Win.

As we all know, antimicrobial resistance is a global problem. And one of the major contributory factors is inappropriate antibiotic use, and, therefore, one needs antimicrobial stewardship to contain antimicrobial resistance.

One of the major strategies of stewardship has been the implementation of antibiotic policy guidelines. But in various contexts and scenarios this has been a challenge to truly implement it and disseminate it in an effective manner.

So I would like to tell you about a quick win story from a hospital in South India where we assessed the impact of these guidelines on antibiotic use over a 10-year period. Vellore district, a district in the southern Tamil Nadu state of India, with a population of 4 million people, an area of 6,000 square kilometres, 60% of the population has a rural background with a literacy of 79%. The main occupation is agriculture. The hospital itself, is 115 years old, a not-for-profit, tertiary care teaching hospital, more than 2,000 beds and 6,000 outpatients a day, pretty large by any standard in the world. We have various departments, of which the Department of Microbiology is a national centre for quality assessment.

There’s a compurised network existing in the hospital and also in the pharmacy.

There’s a Drugs and Therapeutics Committee, a Hospital Infections Control Committee, an Antibiotic Policy Group, all of which are functioning quite well.