What is it about?
We carried out half-day educational activities to share ideas about drug resistance and antibiotic use with villagers in southern Lao PDR. The objective of our study was to inform global health agendas from a social science perspective. We found that the activity appeared to improve participants' understanding of drug resistance, but the effects did not extend to the rest of the villages (although the participants talked about what they learned). In addition, the new knowledge had at best a small positive effect of people's healthcare choices, but this might only be a statistical anomaly. We cannot rule out that also negative effects follow from new knowledge, for instance an unnecessary increase of antibiotic use. We used local media and concepts to share content based on educational material from the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and the World Organisation for Animal Health. The activity lasted half a day; it was designed for 25 to 40 participants and implemented in two villages. To measure impacts, we interviewed - through surveys - all villagers before and after the activity.
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Why is it important?
Antibiotic and antimicrobial resistance are a top priority in global health. This "superbug crisis" threatens to contribute to millions of deaths every year unless action is taken to mitigate it. While global action plans routinely suggest educational campaigns to raise awareness of the threat among populations and healthcare professionals (e.g. doctors, nurses), we know very little about the usefulness, effectiveness, and side-effects of such campaigns. This social research study is one of the most detailed micro-level assessments of the consequences of awareness raising, and it suggests that the awareness agenda needs to be complemented with broader behavioural approaches to understand and influence health behaviours. In developing countries like Laos, other factors like poverty or healthcare access may be more important factors for people's health choices than their knowledge of drug resistance.
Perspectives
Through fantastic contributions from regional social researchers, we were able to make complicated problems more accessible to rural populations, And yet, our findings show that the content might not be immediately relevant to people's own lives - even if it is considered a global health priority! This does not mean failure for us; rather, the activity taught us the important limitations and problematic assumptions that are often behind seemingly easy claims that all we need to do is "raise awareness" about a problem.
Dr Marco J Haenssgen
University of Warwick
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Consequences of AMR Education and Awareness Raising: Outputs, Outcomes, and Behavioural Impacts of an Antibiotic-Related Educational Activity in Lao PDR, Antibiotics, November 2018, MDPI AG,
DOI: 10.3390/antibiotics7040095.
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