Antimicrobial stewardship by Australian community pharmacists: Uptake, collaboration, challenges, and needs

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To assess community pharmacists' (CPs') awareness and uptake of evidence-based antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) strategies, attitudes toward collaboration with general practitioners (GPs), and needs to improve AMS practices. METHODS: A nationwide survey of randomly sampled community pharmacies across Australia was conducted in April-October 2019. RESULTS: The response rate of CPs was 30.7% (613 of 2000) and 592 participating CPs (96.5%) described the key barriers to and facilitators of improving AMS. CPs (447 of 613, 72.9%) were familiar with AMS but felt that they would require training (468 of 612, 76.5%) and access to AMS practice guidelines (566 of 605, 93.6%). Respondents perc..