Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR)

Projects Publications Team Gallery
Logo
About Experience Portofolio Contact

Addressing the Global Health Crisis: HISP India's Innovative Initiatives to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) is one of the most significant health challenges facing the world today, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) already grappling with existing inequities in access to and quality of care across various socioeconomic, geographic, and demographic categories. The causes and effects of AMR are interconnected and mutually reinforcing, with AMR being both a cause and a consequence of existing inequities in LMICs. In India, for example, high disease burden, limited resources, and weak health systems result in the inappropriate use of antibiotics, which is the leading driver of AMR, thereby exacerbating the existing inequities. Several policies and frameworks are defined at the global and national levels. For instance, the Global Action Plan (GAP) developed by WHO guided the development of National action plans (NAPs) in partner countries. It discusses the key strategies to address AMR at national and global levels. All NAPs emphasize the importance of using antimicrobials carefully and appropriately. However, they do not consider the contextual challenges and obstacles hindering progress towards this goal, especially in resource-constrained settings already grappling with existing challenges. Efforts to combat AMR are challenged by the poor availability of reliable data, particularly from low and middle-income countries, making it very difficult to estimate the burden of disease. The availability of information is a critical component to identifying the contextual challenges to address AMR.
image

PROJECTS

HISP India is engaging with the challenge with following three initiatives
Equity
AMR EquityAMR is an interdisciplinary project informed by systems thinking. The project aims to examine the interactions and relationships among surveillance, diagnosis, and treatment in the context of antimicrobial resistance. This analysis is situated within the context of social structures such as literacy, poverty and caste, the violence they create and how these influence processes of AMR- related healthcare care access and utilization for people.
Read more
COMBAT
AMR COMBAT AMR in Africa Network (COmprehensive Multi-Centre Bioinformatics - based Action to Tackle AMR in sub-Saharan Africa) is a partnership of six German specialized departments for infectious diseases and/or tropical medicine of public university hospitals and their longstanding partner institutions, universities and referral hospitals in five different countries of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Read more
AMR Surveillance
in India
HISP India is working in the domain of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) surveillance since 2018. This work focuses on the digitisation of microbiology labs of tertiary public medical colleges related to AMR testing in the states of Himachal Pradesh and Bihar. Broadly, the work involves digitisation for surveillance of antimicrobial sensitivity and resistance patterns for clinical care and for the partners to develop facility-specific (ASP). Read more

Publications

Mukherjee, A., Surial, R., Sahay, S., Thakral, Y., & Gondara, A (2024). Social and cultural determinants of antibiotics prescriptions?: Analysis from a public community health centre in North India. Frontiers in Pharmacology, 15, 1277628.
Arunima S. Mukherjee, Sundeep Sahay,Systems thinking based approaches to engage with health inequities shaping Antimicrobial Resistance in low and lower-middle-income countries,Journal of Infection and Public Health, Volume 16, Supplement 1,2023,
Modgil, V., Sahay, S., Taneja, N., Mukherjee, A., Pahil, S., Kaur, H., ... & Sinha, O. (2023). Assessing Feasibility of Point-of-Care Antibiotics Susceptibility Testing Technologies for Mitigating Access Gaps for Peripheral Communities (No. 11478). IFIP 9.4 (in progress)
Thakral, Y, Sahay, S & Mukherjee, A. (2022). Addressing the ‘antibiotics use’ challenge: An Action Design Research study from India. Information systems journal, 2022 (in progress)
Thakral, Yogita. (2022). Digital Monitoring of Antibiotic Resistance (ABR) in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Narrative Literature Review. 33-40. 10.3384/ecp187006.
Thakral Y, Sahay S, Mukherjee A. Strengthening digital monitoring of antibiotic resistance in low-resource settings. J Glob Health. 2022 Oct 1;12:03061. doi: 10.7189/jogh.12.03061. PMID: 36183253; PMCID: PMC9527008.
Thakral, Yogita; Sahay, Sundeep; and Mukherjee, Arunima, "Designing an Antibiotics Resistance (ABR) monitoring system to strengthen the evidence base for facilitating responsible antibiotics prescription by physicians: A case study from India" (2022). ICIS 2022 Proceedings. 3.
Thakral, Y., Sahay, S., & Mukherjee, A. (2022). Routinizing practices and stabilizing institutional work: A case of digital monitoring of Antibiotic Resistance (ABR) in India. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 51, pp-pp.
Sundeep Sahay, Gitika Arora, Yogita Thakral, Ernst Kristian Rødland, Arunima Sehgal Mukherjee. Designing for Scale: Strengthening Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance in Low Resource Settings. IFIP Joint Working Conference on the Future of Digital Work: The Challenge of Inequality (IFIPJWC), Dec 2020, Hyderabad, India. pp.251-264, ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-64697-4_19⟩. ⟨hal-03450704⟩