World AMR Awareness Week (WAAW) webinar
In the context of a multimodal improvement strategy, WHO highlights the importance of training of health workers for sustainable improvement in reducing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) through infection prevention and control (IPC) practices.
Many countries are demonstrating strong engagement and advancements in scaling-up IPC strategies and actions, but overall, the progress is slow. In multiple WHO surveys for example, training and education was the weakest component of IPC programmes around the world both at the national and facility level. Training and professional education on AMR in human health is also a challenge, and only 23% of the countries reported having AMR as a part of the pre-service training of all relevant cadres of health workers1.
The WHO Global action plan and monitoring framework on infection prevention and control (IPC), 2024-20302, provides countries with a roadmap to enable the implementation of the WHO Global Strategy in IPC3. Strategic direction four of this plan specifically calls on countries to take actions to improve knowledge about IPC among health and care workers, with targets and indicators recommended to demonstrate progress in this area.
With a global workforce of sixty-five million health workers, this year's World AMR Awareness Week campaign theme to EDUCATE, ADVOCATE and ACT can help save lives.
Objectives:
- To provide perspectives and evidence related to the value of AMR/IPC education and training.
- To present an overview of WHO resources for training on IPC including the recent WHO global IPC in-service curriculum and the soon to be launched pre-graduate IPC curriculum
- To present an overview of the WHO competency framework for health workers education and training on AMR, Health workers education and training on AMR curricula guide and the Antimicrobial resistance curriculum assessment tool for medical education.
- To share an example of innovation in education and training: WHO “My 5 Moments: The Game.”
Panel discussion about how these resources can be used to advance AMR/IPC education in your region/country/facility.
1FAO, OIE, WHO. Global Database for the Tripartite Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Country Self-assessment Survey (TrACSS) [online database]. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2022 (http://amrcountryprogress.org/).
2Global action plan and monitoring framework on infection prevention and control, 2024 - 2030. World Health Organization; 2024 (https://www.who.int/teams/integrated-health-services/infection-prevention-control/draft-global-action-plan-and-monitoring-framework-on-ipc).
3Global strategy on infection prevention and control. World Health Organization; 2023.