• Alex Bhattacharya, Susan Hopkins, Anna Sallis, Emma L Budd, and Diane Ashiru-Oredope.
• Public Health England, AMR Programme, SE1 8UG, London, UK.
• J Public Health (Oxf). 2017 Jun 1; 39 (2): e40-e47.

BackgroundPublic Health England developed and led a new UK-wide pledge campaign aiming to improve behaviours around the prudent use and prescription of antibiotics. This paper presents a process evaluation for the first season of the campaign to determine the impact of the campaign and inform future campaigns.MethodsData were collected from AntibioticGuardian.com and Google analytics between August 2014 and January 2015. The primary outcome was the decision to pledge and was assessed according to target audience, location, source and route of referral to the website.ResultsThere were 47 158 unique visits to the website and 12 509 visitors made a pledge (26.5%) to become Antibiotic Guardians (AGs); 69% were healthcare professionals. Social media directed the most traffic to the website (24% of the public that signed up cited social media as how they discovered the campaign), other acquisition routes such as self-directed, email or website referral, were more effective at encouraging visitors to pledge.ConclusionsThe campaign completed its goal of 10 000 AGs in the first year. Further work is required to improve engagement with target audiences and determine whether this campaign has an impact on antibiotic consumption and prescribing behaviour among the public and healthcare professionals.© Crown copyright 2016.

18 keywords...

hide…