Transitioning to people-centred antimicrobial resistance surveillance

The authors contend that current global antimicrobial resistance (AMR) surveillance systems, which heavily emphasise reporting aggregated data to international initiatives, underutilise the most important function of blood cultures—as timely, patient-centred diagnostics for suspected sepsis and bloodstream infections—and risk being unsustainable and of limited clinical benefit, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs); they argue that repositioning surveillance around people-centred use of diagnostic data—ensuring that local hospitals can rapidly access, interpret and act on their own AMR results to inform clinical management, antimicrobial stewardship, and local prescribing policies—will improve patient outcomes, strengthen laboratory capacity, enhance the relevance and sustainability of surveillance efforts, foster broader engagement including community awareness, and help integrate AMR monitoring into wider infectious disease frameworks rather than functioning as isolated reporting systems focused primarily on global statistics.