Last month, members of the ID-CARE REVERSE team headed to Greece to join a series of scheduled hospital site visits as part of the REVERSE project.
REVERSE, a Horizon 2020 project, started in July 2021 and involves 24 European hospitals across Italy, Spain, Romania and Greece. The main aim of REVERSE is to reduce the burden of antimicrobial resistance in high prevalence healthcare settings. To achieve this, the project focusses on the development and implementation of cost-effective strategies and tools for the prevention and clinical management of healthcare-associated infections due to multidrug-resistant organisms.
The ID-CARE Team at the University of Verona coordinates the Antibiotic Stewardship (ABS) Programme within Work Package 4, with the aim of implementing basic best practice interventions. For example, audit and feedback on compliance with guidance on antibiotic use, training on judicious antibiotic prescription, guidance documents on syndrome-specific treatment, and so on.
In November 2023, ID-CARE and REVERSE team member, Maela Tebon, attended a series of site visits led and coordinated by the REVERSE Implementation Science Team (Work Package 5). Prior to the implementation of the basic ABS intervention next year, the team visited three Greek hospitals. These consisted of in-depth interviews with key staff with the aim of understanding how they are engaged in ABS activities, their viewpoint and perspective. To help the discussion, a local interpreter was at disposal during each interview.
The site visits provided a unique opportunity to build a closer collaboration between REVERSE research teams, to explore the organisational context for ABS and and to generate a clear overview of current ABS activities at REVERSE hospitals.
Discussing this recent experience, Maela shared that “after two years of working on this huge project behind a desktop, it was the first time that I have seen with my own eyes the power of the REVERSE project. We have a mission, and the collaboration among the different teams involved in the project is the key for achieving our goals”