Challenges in Identifying Antibiotic Resistance Targets for Point-of-Care Diagnostics in General Practice

Abstract

General practitioners stand at the front line of healthcare provision and have a pivotal role in the fight against increasing antibiotic resistance. In this respect, targeted antibiotic prescribing by general practitioners would help reduce the unnecessary use of antibiotics, leading to reduced treatment failures, fewer side-effects for patients and a reduction in the (global) spread of antibiotic resistances. Current ‘gold standard’ antibiotic resistance detection strategies tend to be slow, taking up to 48 h to obtain a result, although the implementation of point-of-care testing by general practitioners could help achieve the goal of targeted antibiotic prescribing practices. However, deciding on which antibiotic resistances to include in a point-of-care diagnostic is not a trivial task, as outlined in this publication.

Microbiological air quality in pharmacies and an antibiotic resistance profile of staphylococci species

“…Many initiatives are being launched in efforts to reduce or slow down the rate of increase in resistance. Since rational use of antibiotics is so important, targeted antibacterial therapies, consistent with the antibiotic susceptibility profiles of bacterial strains, have been suggested very recently, (Mitsakakis et al 2018). Finally, there are many ways to maintain good air quality including regular microbiological testing (Pallabi 2018).…”

RespiDisk: a point-of-care platform for fully automated detection of respiratory tract infection pathogens in clinical samples

“…As a consequence, this promotes the rise of antibiotic resistances. 2,3 In several occasions, such as in Emergency Rooms or in remote clinics, the diagnosis of RTI pathogens can be especially challenging 4 as it must be done rapidly and at the patient side instead of following the routine procedure of sample collection and dispatching it to a central laboratory for analysis. Therefore, on-site testing enables immediate patient management at the point of care.…”

Enabling appropriate use of antibiotics: review of European Union procedures of harmonising product information, 2007 to 2020

“…Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the most important challenges in modern clinical practice [1,2]. It is a multifactorial problem that must be tackled from different angles [3].…”