A multi-stakeholder approach towards operationalising antibiotic stewardship in India's pluralistic rural health system.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In this study we seek to develop a stewardship intervention that addresses two major interrelated challenges that India faces: increasing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and a pluralistic health system with a large and unregulated informal health sector. AMR is high on India's policy agenda as it has one of the highest burdens of bacterial infections in the world and is also one of the world's biggest consumers of antibiotics (ABs) for human health. One of the major causes of increasing AMR is the excessive use of ABs in humans, animals and the environment. A majority of healthcare providers in rural India, where 68% of the population lives, do not have a formal medical qualification but they fulfil a need for proximate healthcare that the formal health sector has not been able to fill. They are the first contact providers for a variety of illnesses, who frequently and inappropriately treat with ABs. Some states in India, including West Bengal, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh are implementing programmes of training and integrating informal providers (IPs) but evaluations suggest that providers' use of antibiotics has proven difficult to change. We conducted a study in 2016-17 (funded by HSRI Call 3) in rural West Bengal to understand the social, economic and behavioural drivers of antibiotic use (ABU) by IPs in order to address the root causes and develop tailored solutions. We found that the key drivers lay beyond IPs' individual economic needs and knowledge gaps. There was a strong influence of the pharmaceutical industry's aggressive marketing of antibiotics, and the regulatory and health systems had limited resources and capacity to provide stewardship in this health market. Although IPs' integration had initially been opposed by the Indian Medical Association at present there were mutually supportive relationships between informal providers and formal doctors (both public and private) on an individual level. IPs learned from formal doctors who have also been found to prescribe inappropriately. Other drivers were communities' low awareness about the long term dangers of inappropriate antibiotic use, and low purchasing power for full courses. We found that about a quarter of the IPs also treated animals, typically with the same antibiotics as humans. To contain antimicrobial resistance (AMR), we need to work collectively with these diverse stakeholders to arrive at solutions through deliberations and consensus. In this study we propose to co-design an intervention with multiple stakeholders to serve as an effective model of antibiotic stewardship and health systems strengthening at this level.We will start with formative research in two rural locations in district South 24 Parganas in West Bengal (where our previous study was located) to supplement the data that we have collected in our earlier study. During this phase we will explore antibiotic use with animals in more detail, map the pharmaceutical supply and value chains for human and animal ABU, conduct a stakeholder analysis, map community platforms for behavioural communication and conduct a secondary data review of local AMR prevalence.This will be followed by an intervention development phase where we will work with key stakeholders identified through the stakeholder analysis using 'Deliberative Mapping', a participatory methodology used with multiple stakeholders for democratic decision making. The intervention options that arise from this process will be further developed and piloted with a small group of providers, about 20 in each site. Evaluation will consist of a feasibility analysis of what worked and did not work, any changes in antibiotic use by IPs (IP and patient exit interviews), and analysis of the actions and reactions of stakeholders during the co-design phase to provide systematic learning to support the design of strategies for strengthening stewardship at scale in future, both in India as well as in similar settings in South Asia and Africa.