The Global Antimicrobial Stewardship Hub (GASPH) – focusing on partnerships and sharing of open access digital earning resources to primarily support antimicrobial stewardship practice

Continuous medical education and availability of clinical and professional organization guidelines should be leveraged to improve the knowledge of AMR and rational prescription among health profession interns. Their high confidence in rational prescription practices should be pivotal to the fight against AMR.

The launch of GASPH
The world has awakened to the liberty and freedoms afforded by recent advancements in technology that offer opportunities to connect with each other across the globe, to deliver education, share experiences and work together virtually in ways unimaginable only a decade ago.  Against this landscape, and to address the identified education needs we are excited to have launched the GASPH, hosted by the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (BSAC), with the aspiration of establishing a truly cooperative global community dedicated to addressing the challenges of Antimicrobial Stewardship (AMS) through shared education, training and tacit learning.

Accelerating the PACE of action
The mission of GASPH is to accelerate the PACE of action on AMR through Partnership, Advocacy, Commerce, and investment, and with strong focus on Education. Representatives from over 40 partner organizations joined the GASPH launch webinar on 30th May 2022 and there was much enthusiasm for working together to support shared learning. The provision of an open access e-learning, knowledge sharing platform will amplify, promote, and enhance the work undertaken by a range of stakeholders now and in the future. Regular virtual meetings will support sharing of outputs from collaboration and stimulate discussion of key issues, exploration of further areas for collaborative working and development of new relationships.

Expert Steering Committee and Global Advisory Board
The GASPH platform is supported via the BSAC secretariat with governance provided via a multi-professional, regionally representative Expert Steering Committee and partner organizations collaborating via Global Advisory Board webinar meetings three times per year. Partners organizations will be multi-professional ranging from professional societies, NGOs, and others. Their primary focus will be to actively promote or champion sharing and curation of digital learning within their own and the broader communities and create a global knowledge network focused on education and ‘real world’ implementation of AMS and where appropriate broader AMR interventions. This focus on open access to digital training resources, thereby reducing costs and fostering greater buy-in from professional societies will help to overcome barriers identified to participating in AMS training.

Combination of online learning and face-to-face training
The combination of online learning, with face-to-face training where required and remote expert coaching may prove to be most useful to develop and embed AMS practice. The key benefit of joining GASPH is shared learning with free membership for partner organizations wishing to share resources including good practice examples and for individuals seeking access to education and training. To date, our e-learning repository has 829 resources from 138 countries across six continents (most are peer-reviewed) and our training hub includes 32 online courses. The figure below illustrates the GASPH landing page and some close partnerships with key organisations supporting AMS. We acknowledge the potential challenges of digital resources in some settings and the language requirements of learners. Most resources are in English, but we are exploring how to increase access to content in other languages.

Join us on this journey
We hope you will join us on this journey to achieve our ambition of an open access education utopia that will support our mission to use shared knowledge and experience to slow the AMR pandemic. To find out more visit: GASPH.

This article is adapted from the full version : Jacqueline Sneddon and others, Introducing the global antimicrobial stewardship partnership hub (GASPH): creating conditions for successful global partnership collaboration, JAC-Antimicrobial Resistance, Volume 4, Issue 6, December 2022, dlac115, https://doi.org/10.1093/jacamr/dlac115