Summary of Week 3

The key takeaway messages for this week are:

Overuse of antibiotics in health care facilities such as hospitals and care homes has led to high levels of
resistance in bacteria found in healthcare settings. These resistant infections are threatening patient safety
in health care facilities.

Diagnostics can be used to detect bacteria that cause HAIs and determine their level of resistance

Diagnostics can be used in health care settings:

• to identify patients who are colonized with HAI pathogens (i.e. Screening) so that they can be placed under strict
infection prevention and control (IPC) measures, such as isolation, handwashing, to prevent spread of the resistant
organisms
• to identify infected patients to guide their treatment
• for surveillance of HAIs in health care settings to determine the prevalence of HAIs to facilitate IPC strategies, be
alerted to outbreaks and to assess the impact of interventions
 Summary of Week 3

Next week we will learn about the role of diagnostics in enteric infections using
Salmonella, Shigella and E. coli as examples. We will explore how diagnostics can be
used in an One Health approach to reduce the use of antibiotics in both humans and
animals.
The activities are available to view now, but if you decide to review them early you may
want to return to the comments and discussions while the week is live to see the
perspectives of other learners and to offer your own.
At the end of each week, we collate the key thoughts, themes, and any questions from
your conversations in a summary document added to the Downloads section at the
bottom of this page.