Optimising Antibiotic Duration Dashboard

Combatting antimicrobial resistance – the UK second five-year national action plan continues to promote optimal use of antimicrobials in humans to ensure safe and effective patient care by strengthening antimicrobial stewardship programmes which should include the review of dose and duration of antimicrobial prescriptions.

There is also an ambition to reduce UK antimicrobial use in humans by 5% by 2029. Optimising the duration of antibiotic use supports delivery of both these key requirements, and NICE publish antimicrobial stewardship guidance that provides evidence based recommendations for duration of antibiotic use.

These dashboards use routine primary care antimicrobial prescribing data accessed from NHSBSA ePACT2 analysis to report novel metrics that can be used to optimise duration of antibiotic use in primary care. Metrics have been developed by the NHS England AMR Programme using NICE antimicrobial stewardship guidance content for dose and duration of selected antibiotic formulations.