A resource for managers, team leads and senior staff in health settings in antimicrobial resistance (AMR) surveillance networks.
Find tools and resources to make informed decisions about your involvement in AMR work and implementing effective AMR surveillance.
As a health professional, you have a key role to play in addressing the global threat of AMR. The AMR surveillance toolkit supports you and your colleagues to learn more about AMR and develop more effective ways of working together to address it.
This toolkit is a collection of three main tools. Each tool includes various tasks that you and your colleagues, as a team, can do to develop new strategies around AMR practice that you can use in your day-to-day work. The three tools are designed to be used in combination with the OU/Fleming Fund online modules, but they can also be used independently from the modules.
- Tool 1: Your role in an AMR surveillance network. Tool 1 includes a number of activities that can help you and your colleagues reflect on your own roles and responsibilities, and the roles of other people. You can also identify gaps in existing roles within their own work setting (such as a local AMR network), understand the contribution of each role to the network and negotiate how you can work together more effectively.
- Tool 2: Dealing with AMR data. Tool 2 is designed to help you and your colleagues understand your contribution to data collection and management within AMR surveillance systems and identify areas for improvements in your workplace. By using this tool you will also have an opportunity to build on your understanding of bias and validity and the interpretation of data from AMR studies.
- Tool 3: Reflecting on your work and changing your workplace. Tool 3 encourages you and your colleagues to develop strategies to apply your learning or what you know to day-to-day work. It also helps you to find ways to overcome barriers that delay or stop you as a team from applying your new learning or what you already know.
The AMR surveillance toolkit can be used by a range of animal and human health professionals based in healthcare settings as well as other stakeholders in related organisations, such as government departments. It is designed with a particular focus on professionals in management or leadership roles who can encourage and influence relevant staff, including (but not limited to) managers and senior managers, supervisors, technical leads and site leaders, heads of sections, administrators, and policy-makers.
Here is what one health professional, a Laboratory Manager at a Teaching Hospital in Ghana, told us upon completing the toolkit activities with his team:
This particular toolkit is unique. We've never had something like this. […] This is designed in such a way that it's optimally interactive. It is not one person talking and the rest of the people listening […] It is a more effective way of actually learning on the job than what we've been doing previously.
The toolkit was developed as part of the Fleming Fund project, a £265 million UK aid investment to tackle AMR in low- and middle-income countries around the world. The programme is managed by the UK Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) in partnership with Mott MacDonald, the Fleming Fund Grants Management Agent. It was written by Koula Charitonos, Saraswati Dawadi, Fereshte Goshtasbpour (The Open University, UK) and Skye Badger (Ausvet), with contributions from Allison Littlejohn (UCL Knowledge Lab, UK), Abhinav Vaidya and Santosi Giri (Nepal Public Health Research and Development Center), and Alex Owusu-Ofori (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana).
The AMR surveillance toolkit is part of the Fleming Fund collection Tackling antimicrobial resistance, available from The Open University’s OpenLearn Create platform.
This content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.
