Surveillance: GLASS

Background

The Global Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System (GLASS) has been developed by WHO to provide a standardised approach to collecting, analysing and sharing AMR data at a global level (WHO, n.d. 1).

GLASS encourages and facilitates the establishment of national AMR surveillance systems that are capable of monitoring AMR trends and producing reliable and comparable data.

How GLASS encourages the communication of AMR data

(GLASS is covered in detail in the Introducing AMR surveillance systems and An overview of national AMR surveillance modules.)

The GLASS objectives are to:

• foster national surveillance systems and harmonise global standards
• regularly analyse and report global data on AMR and AMU
• estimate the extent and burden of AMR globally by selected indicators
• detect emerging resistance and its international spread
• inform implementation of targeted prevention and control programmes
• assess the impact of interventions.

One of the key outputs from GLASS is its annual (and publicly available) report on surveillance data. The report contains information on surveillance system status as well as data on key pathogens and resistance patterns. Because the data is presented in the same format for each country, stakeholders can easily see how their system, and the data it produces, compares with others across the world. Standardising data in this way makes it a highly effective way of communicating data at the global level.

Although initially GLASS focused on AMR data, the system is expanding to address consumption and use to obtain and share standardised data at the global level.