Antimicrobial Stewardship Strategies
Public Health Ontario (PHO) has identified and described 32 antimicrobial stewardship tools, interventions and activities (collectively termed “strategies”) that can be used to streamline and improve antimicrobial use and educate prescribers. Health care institutions can employ these strategies to help build, grow and enhance their antimicrobial stewardship program (ASP). PHO has described each strategy, its advantages, disadvantages, metrics, and provided supporting references, resources, and tools, including examples from Canadian hospitals.
Many factors will influence which strategies an institution chooses to implement, including its size, patient population, culture and priorities, and resources.
Select your strategies
To help determine the strategies best suited to your institution, you can sort them by several criteria:
- Priority level: high, medium or low priority (A, B or C)
- Difficulty level: easy, intermediate or difficult to implement (1, 2 or 3)
- PHO core strategy: identified by PHO’s ASP team as important foundations of an institutional ASP
- Those with evidence to support certain antimicrobial stewardship outcomes
- Program stage: early, intermediate or advanced
To learn more about the development of the criteria, please refer to the Antimicrobial Stewardship Strategy Criteria Reference Guide.
PHO would like to acknowledge and thank the health care professionals who provided advice during the development of this resource, reviewed the documents, and/or generously provided examples of tools and guidelines from their institutions to support the stewardship strategies.
Has your institution developed a novel or useful tool that supports one of the antimicrobial stewardship strategies? If so, and you would like to share it, please email asp@oahpp.ca.
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