Summit background
Uppsala Health Summit 2020 on Managing Antimicrobial Resistance through Behaviour Change,
19-21 October 2020
Use and inappropriate use of medicines have led to growing resistance to drugs used for treating different kinds of infections. The World Health Organization today identifies antimicrobial resistance as one of the top ten threats to global health that requires urgent action.
The last five years have seen increased commitments within the global community to tackle growing drug resistance. In 2015, the World Health Assembly endorsed a global action plan, and Member States were encouraged to develop their own national action plans. The following year, antimicrobial resistance was also discussed in the UN General Assembly, and as a result, the UN Interagency Coordination Group (IACG) on Antimicrobial Resistance was formed. In 2019, this group handed over its concluding report ‘No Time to Wait: Securing the Future from Drug-Resistant Infections’, to the UN Secretary-General, including a set of recommendations to guide future work.
Achieving these objectives will require change in behaviours, on individual, organizational and system levels.
The goal of Uppsala Health Summit 2020 is to support the work that take place on global and national levels to address antimicrobial resistance with a special focus on improving knowledge and changing behaviours. In workshops and in plenary sessions, the program will center on strategies for sustained change in behaviours. We will identify existing scalable, evidence-based solutions and discuss obstacles for implementation. What can we learn from other fields and do we need to reframe the messages for better impact?
The dialogue at the summit will focus on:
- Making Sense of Antibiotic Resistance: Communicate for Change
- Why not practice knowledge? The art of disease prevention
- Lots of talk but little action: What’s hindering the implementation of incentives to stimulate antibiotics R&D?
- Creating an AMR-smart generation with Education as Change Agent
- Drug Resistance and the Environment
- Three possible solutions to address antibiotics shortages and improve antibiotics supply globally
- Children and the wild: Opportunities and Perils in human-animal learning encounters
- How to influence mental barriers to modified consumer behaviors in retail
Uppsala Health Summit 2020 stands on the shoulders of Uppsala Health Summit 2015, which addressed implementation of the Global Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance across six focus-areas, as well as our summit 2017 which explored One Health solutions to tackle infectious disease threats.This time we will expand the community of discussants to include a greater focus on the social and behavioural sciences.
More information about the programme will come soon!