Promoting medical student engagement with antimicrobial stewardship through involvement in undergraduate research

The National Health Service recognises the importance of research, teaching, and training to the future success of the organisation and medical students are expected to qualify with the necessary clinical, professional, and academic skills to support this. There is a wide variation in the level of cross-specialty engagement with Antimicrobial Stewardship (AMS) & Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) research at UK and international state-of-the-art conferences, with a heterogeneous level of importance also attributed amongst undergraduate and postgraduate training pathways across clinical medicine. It therefore seems apparent that the AMS-AMR agenda needs to be promoted from within specialties, rather than being ‘pushed’ on them as an external agenda, to promote broad ownership and capacity within all clinical specialties that use antimicrobials. This must start early during undergraduate medical training. We investigated whether the use of an online platform designed to facilitate medical student research projects could be utilised to promote undergraduate engagement with AMSAMR at Imperial College School of Medicine between July 2015 and 2016. During this period 12 applicants were appointed to 11 of the 13 advertised projects. So far, students undertaking these projects have achieved: 1 peer-reviewed publication, 3 national oral presentations, 1 national prize, 1 international poster presentation, 3 national poster presentations, and 2 further manuscripts are currently under peer-review. Furthermore, despite the students’ broad career interests there has been a high retention rate with students requesting involvement in further AMS-AMR related activities. Further longitudinal assessment of this tool for promoting undergraduate engagement with AMS-AMR research is now being explored