This week pharmacy staff across NHS Lanarkshire have been holding events to make colleagues, patients and visitors aware of World Antimicrobial Resistance Awareness Week (WAAW).
WAAW a global campaign to raise awareness and understanding of Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and promote best practices among healthcare staff to reduce the emergence and spread of drug-resistant infections.
This year’s them remains the same as 2022 ‘Preventing antimicrobial resistance together’ and calls for everyone to preserve the effectiveness of antimicrobials and help effectively reduce AMR. By using antimicrobials prudently and appropriately this will decrease the incidence of infections. AMR is a threat to not only humans, but animals, plants and the environment around us. It affects us all.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) is also asking people around the world to Go Blue for WHO AMR as part of WAAW and tonight our three acute sites will light up blue to support the campaign.
Our pharmacy staff have also been unveiling new blue uniforms with Pharmacist embroidered on the tunic. This will make our clinical ward pharmacy teams more readily identifiable to other staff groups and patients. The new uniforms also align with our ‘bare below the elbow’ policy and facilitates good hand hygiene and hand washing practices to reduce and prevent infection transmission within our clinical patient care environments.
