Members of the SIDP Public Outreach Committee recently published an editorial in the Journal of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy on pharmacists’ role in antimicrobial stewardship (ASP) interventional research. 

Most healthcare institutions in the U.S. rely on pharmacy services to develop and expand ASP initiatives. In 2019, members of the committee sought to characterize trends in ASP interventional research. Using PubMed to identify studies evaluating the impact of an ASP intervention from 1990-2019 in North America, SIDP found that the frequency of pharmacist authorship has been increasing over the last twenty years. Overall, two-thirds of publications included a pharmacist as an author. A subset of one-hundred studies was further reviewed for intervention type, outcomes of interest, study setting, population, and descriptive methodology. The findings of this report informed the following recommendations and opportunities for expansion in ASP interventional research:

• Pharmacists should have a direct role in conducting and disseminating research that evaluates ASP interventions and the impact on patient outcomes.
• Pharmacists should expand ASP research beyond adult inpatient settings and routinely evaluate areas of need for interventional research.
• Pharmacists should create collaborative networks to facilitate multicenter studies, increase the generalizability, diversify populations, and promote leadership and professional growth.
• Publications on research evaluating ASP intervention should document the pharmacist(s) role and the ASP/pharmacy practice model in the intervention.