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September Newsletter

Date

Welcome back to regular newsletters which will  be shared every quarter. We hope you are keeping well and continuing your fantastic work in the space of AMR and Community Engagement. 

CE4AMR update 

The CE4AMR team based at Leeds have finally been returning to field work post-pandemic! Our large COSTAR project, led by Rebecca King, combines participatory video and community dialogue approaches to address AMR across Bangladesh and Nepal. This project has allowed teams from the University of Leeds to visit partners in HERDinternational (Nepal) and ARK Foundation (Bangladesh) for the first time in almost three years! These trips were fantastic opportunities to connect with our colleagues and shape the projects in more detail.  

CE4AMR team also released a number of outputs, including;

  • A co-produced AMR teacher’s pack which was created during the pandemic with teachers in Nepal and our partners HERDInternational.
  • PhD student, Nichola Jones, had her first publication accepted discussing the importance of taking a gendered lens to AMR studies using community engagement approaches.
  • We’ve been reflecting on the way community-produced resources can be shared outside the context in which they were originally created and have added a blog to our website on this topic.
  • Research Fellow Jess Mitchell travelled to Uganda to begin work on using community mapping to understand the impact of AMR on wildlife health  Community Map Uganda 2022

As we start the new academic year the Leeds-based CE4AMR team will be working on updating our network vision and strategy, hopefully planning some more events to brining network members together. Any ideas for how we can best engage with you all would be most welcome! 

Project insight: COSTAR 

The COSTAR project works in both Nepal and Bangladesh, and in partnership with Malaria Consortium, to co-create community level behaviour change on AMR. Despite the many setbacks of COVID-19 and funding cuts the project has continued with AMR-specific materials, survey tools and training packages now close to completion in Bangladesh. In this setting we will be running a randomised control trail to test the effectiveness of the Community Dialogue Approach (CDA) to create meaningful behaviour change around AMR- drivers in the community. Whilst in both settings we are articulating other community engagement approaches with the CDA. For example, Participatory Video (PV) is being used to capture contextual information about AMR drivers and support the final content of our CDA intervention in Nepal.  

The PV teams in the COSTAR project have been extremely busy over the past few months. The ARK Team in Bangladesh, who are new to this methodology, have conducted one round of piloting and one full workshop series. To find out more we have a full report on their pilot process on our formative outputs page. In Nepal, the HERDi team who developed our very first AMR-focused PV intervention, have conducted two rounds of PV workshops in the Kapilvastu district of the Lumbini Province. The team also supported their communities to host showcasing events for local people and policy makers. To see updates on the showcasing, visit the HERDi and CE4AMR Twitter pages.  

Call for action 

As you will know our website features many exciting CE and AMR projects. If you have new work or updates to be added please let us know at CE4AMR@leeds.ac.uk  

Interesting Publications and Outputs 

Events and workshops 

  • The UN Environmental Programme (now part of the Quadripartite alliance on AMR) are running a series of webinars around AMR in the environment. 
  • The WHO are also running a series of webinars to support the implementation of National AMR action plans.
  • Join Poultry Hub’s Zoodle campaign! Between World Zoonoses Day 2022 (6 July) and One Health Day 2022 (3 November), the One Health Poultry Hub website is featuring Zoodle– a word game inspired by the popular New York Time Wordle game. CE4AMR have designed the word and associated blog for September 15th
  • For those based in the UK bio-artist Anna Dumitriu has a range of exhibitions coming up, you can also access her work online too.

As always, any suggestions for material to be shared on our website’s resources, project or blog areas are most welcome.

Next time

Our next newsletter will be released in December and will focus on outputs from World Antimicrobial Awareness Week (WAAW) in mid-November. If you are planning events for WAAW do let us know as we can share these via our website and Twitter accounts and promote outputs and impacts.

With very best wishes  

Rebecca, Jess and Paul