Thank you for sharing that story. It highlights some of the challenges that people experience first-hand with resistant organisms or infections.
In our brief we recommended, as an example, the scaling up of community-based antimicrobial stewardship programs. We used the example of Do Bugs Need Drugs? I'm not sure if the committee is familiar with the program, but as Yoshi mentioned, it targets across the lifespan. It does teaching in schools about washing your hands, about when you need vaccinations or not, or when you don't need medicine if you're sick. There are those programs that are available that CNA absolutely believes in.
Much of Do Bugs Need Drugs? is a collaborative effort. A colleague of ours who presented last week, Kim Dreher, is a nurse, and she said that at the outset of delivering those programs they were nurse-delivered in communities. Now they're also delivered by med students and pharmacy students. It's a very collaborative effort.
Really, the shift to public education has to start with health care providers. Of course, being from the Nurses Association, I'll just highlight that sometimes nurses are the only health care providers in a community or in a setting. We appreciate the opportunity to respond to that, because we are sometimes people's first point of contact with the health care system. We have a role here in making sure that people are aware in terms of preventing infections but also judiciously using antibiotics.