This is a story about support earned through amazing content, delivery, and participation. The global pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has expressed its interest to continue support for Dr. Shaper Mirza’s virtual course on antimicrobial resistance awareness called ‘Antimicrobial Stewardship Course’!

Antimicrobial resistant infections kills 7 million people every year and if left unchecked will cause 25 million deaths by 2025.  Measures for lowering the burden of antimicrobial resistance includes regulation of prescriptions, improvement in vaccine uptake and vaccine delivery, development of awareness and finally surveillance of resistant organism in community and in hospitals.  Surveillance at both community and hospital levels is key to lower the burden and preventing unnecessary infections.  Dr. Shaper Mirza thinks that to lower the burden of resistant infections acquired in a hospital setting, a vibrant antimicrobial stewardship program is critical. 

Components of a viable antimicrobial stewardship program include appropriate dosing of medicine, regulation of the duration and route of administration of antimicrobials and identification of hotspots in the hospital that are potential reservoirs of antimicrobial resistant infection transmission and finally devising strategies to mitigate the risk of such infections. “The course was therefore developed with the singular goal to provide training to the participants on how to optimize clinical outcomes while minimizing unintended consequences of antimicrobial usage”, says Dr. Shaper. 

Overall, the course was a huge success, which was evident by the fact that every single day it saw at least 150 participants logging in.

Participants were extremely diverse and included students, physicians, clinical pharmacists, laboratory technologists, microbiologist and consultant infectious diseases. At least 160 participants attempted to take part in quizzes and scored a minimum of 50%. Participants appreciated that complete course contents including lecture recordings, lecture slides and all other reading materials including quiz answers and case studies were made available to them at the end of each day. 

The course hopes to help provide physicians, other health care workers and pharmacists, a robust AMS program that will further help develop guidelines for future programs; a sustainable solution to a viable problem.