Take a fresh look at your antibiotic prescription: mySavsnet AMR
SAVSNET has launched a new free benchmarking service, mySavsnet AMR, which will enable you to compare your own practice’s antibiotic prescription against other anonymised practices in the UK.
Antibiotics are precious clinical therapies that must be used with care. As a profession we need to understand their use both at a national level, but also within our own clinical practice. SAVSNET, a collaboration between University of Liverpool and BSAVA, already collects such data from a large network of UK practices. A recent SAVSNET publication highlighted the varied prescription of a select group of “Highest Priority Critically Important Antibiotics” (fluoroquinolones and 3rd generation cephalosporins) (Singleton et al., 2017). Their prescription was shown to be consistently more frequent in cats than dogs, and mostly composed of 3rd generation cephalosporins in cats. As well as contributing to such research, practices in SAVSNET already benefit from free benchmark statistics, allowing them to critically appraise, amongst other things, how their antibiotic prescription compares with their anonymised peers.
But what about those practices that are not currently in SAVSNET? Now researchers at Liverpool have this week launched mySavsnet AMR. David Singleton who helped set up the project said “mySavsnet AMR is a free system that allows practitioners to benchmark their own antibiotic prescription whether they are in SAVSNET or not. All we are asking is practitioners upload a simple dataset that describes their antibiotic prescription in a random set of at least 200 consultations”. Anonymised data will be used by the Liverpool team to understand practice variability in antibiotic prescription across the UK, whilst those submitting data will receive a benchmarking report showing how their prescription compares to their anonymised peers.
Veterinary surgeons wishing to make use of this service should either visit the project website - (www.SAVSNET.co.uk) or email savsnet@liv.ac.uk.
D Singleton, F Sánchez-Vizcaíno, S Dawson, P Jones, P Noble, G Pinchbeck, A Radford. (2017). Patterns of antimicrobial agent prescription in a sentinel population of canine and feline veterinary practices in the United Kingdom. The Veterinary Journal. 224 18-24.