Proceedings of the Experience Sharing in Antimicrobial Stewardship in ASPICON 2023-2024
Navjot Kaur*, Puneet Kaur, Prasan Kumar Panda, Nusrat Shafiq, Presenters 2024, Presenters 2023
JASPI December 2024/ Volume 2/Issue 4
Copyright: © Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Kaur N, Kaur P, Panda PK, Shafiq N, et al.Proceedings of the Experience Sharing in Antimicrobial Stewardship in ASPICON 2023-2024. JASPI. 2024;2(4):59-64
DOI: 10.62541/jaspi064
KEYWORDS: Antimicrobial Stewardship Programs; Institutes of National Importance; One Health; Society of Antimicrobial Stewardship PractIces
Society of Antimicrobial Stewardship PractIces (SASPI) in India is registered under the Society Registration Act in Uttarakhand with registration no. UK0600872022008924 in the year 2022. ASPICON is the annual SASPI conference hosted by the Institutes of National Importance (INIs) across India on a rotational basis. A very interesting activity held at ASPICON every year is the “Integrated Antimicrobial Stewardship Experience Sharing” session. In this session, all the INIs and other Indian institutes are invited to share their stewardship activities and vision for the future. The advantages of this unique session are manifold.First and foremost, it provides a snapshot of stewardship activities at various premier medical institutes in India. This helps one visualise what has been achieved so far what more needs to be done, and in which direction to tackle the menace of emerging antimicrobial resistance effectively. Secondly, this session serves as a “practice-based” hand-holding tool, especially for newly started institutes yet to begin Antimicrobial Stewardship Programs (ASPs).
These relatively younger institutes can identify the bottlenecks and address them better by learning from the troubleshooting experience of other Institutes that have surpassed these challenges. Thirdly, this session also holds promise for established ASP programs by helping them expand their ASPs based on new strategies being followed at other institutes based on their ideation, expertise and resources. Most importantly, this activity allows institutes to periodically self-assess their performance against the goals set out at previous ASPICONs. For instance, about ten years after the inception of AMSP activities at PGIMER Chandigarh, PGI-trained second-generation AMSP stewards have set up institute-specific AMSPs in the new institutes where they work.
The AMSP initiatives presented at ASPICON 2024 held at PGIMER, Chandigarh, were summarised in Table 1 below. Some unique ideas at ASPICON 2024 include an administrative “not push” order for time-dependent antibiotics and the provision of 100% Outpatient Parenteral Antimicrobial Therapy (OPAT) in the Department of Medicine at AIIMS Rishikesh. AIIMS Bibinagar showcased the various “One Health” activities being conducted at the human, plant, animal, and environmental interface under their recently inaugurated “One Health regional coordinator centre. PGIMER Chandigarh stood unique in providing therapeutic drug monitoring services for optimizing antimicrobial doses besides the active engagement in handholding of regional institutes to facilitate them in setting up their ASPs. Orientation programme for ASHA workers at AIIMS Kalyani, pathogen-directed clinical microbiology rounds at AIIMS Patna, periodic integrated multidisciplinary rounds, initiation of holiday reporting and drug consumption audit in addition to AMR surveillance at AIIMS Manglagiri, AMSP-case based discussions at NIZAM, Hyderabad and “rotating best trophy” award for best IPC activities at AIIMS Nagpur were some other unique activities shared at ASPICON 2024.
Similarly, table 1 also describes the AMSP activities presented during the ASPICON 2023 sessions. The lack of uniformity in presentations at ASPICON 2023 and 2024 reflects the differing infrastructure and resources at each participating institute and SASPI being a newly established society. Despite these limitations, the enthusiastic participation of various institutes is a testimony to their commitment to fighting emerging antimicrobial resistance jointly. In a recent significant development, SASPI has released 42 practice statements comprising all three sections of Integrated Antimicrobial Stewardship practices. The degree of adherence to these statements could standardise the presentation format for the subsequent ASPICONs.
Table 1. Summary of Integrated Antimicrobial Stewardship Activities adopted by various institutes across India
*NA: not applicable meaning AMSP activities not shared by INIs at ASPICON 2023, 2024
CONFLICT OF INTERESTS STATEMENT
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
SOURCE OF FUNDING
None
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We duly acknowledge the SASPI office for entrusting us with the compilation of ASPICON 2023 & ASPICON 2024 proceedings and for sharing the presentations from various institutes.
AUTHORS’ CONTRIBUTIONS
NK: Data Collection; Data curation; Manuscript writing
PK: Data Collection; Data curation; Manuscript writing
PKP: Conceptualization; Data resources; Critical review; Approval
NS: Conceptualization; Data resources; Critical review; Approval
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Copyright © Author(s) 2024. JASPI- Journal of Antimicrobial Stewardship Practices and Infectious Diseases.