On Monday, October 10th, the College of Pharmacy had a faculty research seminar presented by Dr. Areeg Ali. Dr. Areeg is a former coordinator and supervisor of Phase IV clinical trials at LaGray Chemical Company, Ghana. She is currently a Professor in the department of clinical pharmacy and pharmacology, at Rak Medical and Health Sciences University (RAKMHSU), and Team-Based Learning coordinator. She is a life member of the Indian Pharmacological Society.
Dr. Areeg presented on “Impact of antibiotic stewardship on surgical prophylaxis and antimicrobial resistance surveillance”, where she started by highlighting the impact of antibiotic overuse as a major factor for causing antibiotic resistance globally and discussed the implementation and evaluation of antimicrobial stewardship programs in Gulf Cooperation Council. She described the methodology of one of her research studies that was conducted to evaluate the effect of the newly implemented antibiotic stewardship program on improving the prescribing practice of surgical antibiotic prophylaxis in a secondary care hospital in the United Arab Emirates by releasing local hospital guidelines. Besides, she presented the results documented in patient profile form and the prescribing practice of surgical antibiotic prophylaxis for clean and clean-contaminant surgical procedures which were compared and analyzed two months prior to and post the implementation of the antibiotic stewardship program. And finally, she emphasized that the guidelines have improved the prescribing practice of antibiotics prior to surgery and shed light on the importance of initiating educational intervention via a cyclic auditing strategy for further improvement. The seminar brought together faculty members from the Departments of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pharmacy Practice.