Article- 14/08/2024

The Antibiotic Stewardship Programme through Innovation, Research, and Education (ASPIRE) is a 3-year project funded by LifeArc that aims to optimise antibiotic use in Zambia and Kenya by integrating innovative digital solutions with targeted stewardship interventions. ASPIRE represents an unprecedented leap in antibiotic stewardship, pioneering the integration of AI-driven digital tools to deliver real-time, contextualized, and data-informed recommendations to clinicians in Zambia and Kenya. This initiative marks a ground-breaking step by introducing a dedicated patient application, a novel concept in the regions, designed for self-reporting of adverse events and providing users with crucial treatment context.

Since the first quarter, ReAct has progressed with training sessions across the four facilities (The University Teaching Hospital (UTH) and Levy Mwanawasa in Zambia and Mama Lucy and AAR Hospital) in Kenya.

In order to have a deeper understanding on the implementation of Antimicrobial Stewardship (AMS) in the selected facilities, a baseline assessment was conducted using the WHO tool on stewardship assessment. This assessment reviewed the different implementation themes that range from leadership, surveillance as well as promotion of rational use of antimicrobials.  This information was disseminated to the facilities, and contributed to the  development of facility action plans.

In Addition, the following activities have taken place in Kenya and Zambia.

·         Development of tools to collect data (both retrospective and prospective data).

·         Training of  facilities in Zambia on retrospective and prospective  collection of AMR  data in facilities.

·          Pharmacy audits have been planned for and will be conducted in facilities under the project in this quarter.

·         Focus Group Discussions (FDGs) and key informant interviews were conducted in order to understand the different challenges that the facilities are facing in implementing AMS, their understanding in what AMS is and lastly, what the prescribing patterns are and what are the drivers of prescribing habits.