Many factors have accelerated the threat of AMR worldwide, including overuse and misuse of medicines in humans, livestock and agriculture, as well as poor access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene.

Here are some links to several short videos on AMR produced by the WHO for World Antimicrobial Awareness Week:

• What is antimicrobial resistance?
• Why is antimicrobial resistance increasing?
• How can you prevent antimicrobial resistance?

Thanks to the project, between January 2016 and June 2020:

• mean delays in the time from admission to first dose of medication dropped from over seven hours to under one hour
• the mean percentage of omitted Parkinson's disease medications reduced from 15.1 to 0.6%.

The authors highlight the following factors as reasons for the project's success:

• Interventions were simple
• Frontline teams took ownership to make changes quickly
• The spouse who wrote the original letter took a leading role in the Collaborative and was able to bring a unique perspective.

Further reading

Keeping patients with Parkinson’s safe in hospital: 4 key actions for staff (blog)

Medication delays: A huge risk for inpatients with Parkinson’s (blog)

Parkinson's Disease awareness video

'To support all prescribers in prescribing safely and effectively, a single prescribing competency framework was originally published by the National Prescribing Centre/National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in 2012. 

NICE and Health Education England approached the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) to manage the update of the framework on behalf of all the prescribing professions in the UK.

A Competency Framework for all Prescribers was first published by the RPS in July 2016. Going forward, the RPS will continue to maintain and publish this framework in collaboration with a multi-disciplinary group with representatives from professional regulators, professional organisations, prescribers from all prescribing professions, lay representatives and other relevant and interested stakeholder groups from across the UK. '

Since the 2016 framework, there have been various changes that needed to be included in the update of the framework, these include:

• Legislation changes introducing paramedic prescribers in April 2018.
• Current prescribing topics, such as remote prescribing, social prescribing, psychosocial assessment and eco-directed sustainable prescribing. 
• Publication of the RPS Competency Framework for Designated Prescribing Practitioners in December 2019; for further information, please see 'A competency framework for designated prescribing practitioners'.

Supporting tools

In light of coroners reports of deaths related to abuse, or accidental overuse of Oramorph or oral morphine sulphate solution. the author argues for increased regulation. Commenting: "In the absence of any action from ministers, it seems that healthcare professionals are going to have to take the care of vulnerable patients into their own hands."

My reflections on this are:

Is this a signal for increased regulation or improved prescribing practice, improved medicine management, and more education & acces to trusted information for patients?

Would there be downsides to increased regulation?