Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a growing global health issue and poses a particular risk to patients with cancer. AMR is where the bacteria and other germs causing infections develop the ability to defeat the medicines made to get rid of them. Many cancer treatments can weaken the body’s ability to protect itself from germs, making infections more common. Preventing and treating these infections often requires antibiotics. But wrong use or using too much antibiotic can contribute to AMR, leading to a higher risk of treatment failure, severe illness, and death. Analysing certain patients’ data is needed to understand how common AMR is in cancer patients, and how this is changing over time – this is called ‘surveillance’. However, not all the data required for this surveillance are available in systems routinely used to monitor infections nationally in the UK.
We aim to address this gap in information available for surveillance by working out how we could use routinely collected hospital data to track AMR among patients with cancer. We will find patients who have had cancer by using codes recorded by hospitals when a patient has cancer, and codes for surgery and chemotherapy/radiotherapy treatments. We will then work out how common resistance is in infections in these patients and estimate how AMR has changed over time. We will also look at how AMR affects patient health outcomes like time spent in hospital and how many people die. Finally, we will identify any factors that make cancer patients more or less likely to develop AMR.