Antimicrobial resistance in E. coli bacteraemia, resistance testing by month
Last updated on Wednesday, 5 February 2025 at 03:10pm
Summary
- Topic
- E-coli
- Category
- testing
- API name
e-coli_testing_bacteraemiaNumberTestedRollingMonth
Rationale
Timely monitoring of susceptibility test results for Escherichia coli (E. coli) supports the government’s 5-year action plan on confronting antimicrobial resistance (AMR; for example, resistance to antibiotics). Antimicrobials presented in this metric have been selected due to their clinical importance when treating serious E. coli infections.
Definition
This metric shows the rolling monthly average of the number of E. coli bacteraemia (bacteria found in patient blood specimens), reported by English laboratories, with susceptibility test results for ciprofloxacin, co-amoxiclav, gentamicin or piperacillin with tazobactam.
Methodology
A national database maintained by UKHSA (the AMR module of SGSS – Second Generation Surveillance System) contains voluntary laboratory data from approximately 98% of hospital microbiology laboratories in England. Data on susceptibility of pathogens was obtained from SGSS for this metric.
Patients may have more than one positive culture (type of laboratory test undertaken on blood specimens) result reported to SGSS, so cultures from the same patient for the same pathogen in a 14-day rolling period are deduplicated to only retain one result representing that episode of bacteraemia per patient. If susceptibility to the antimicrobial was tested for in any culture during the episode, it will be counted in this metric. This metric is calculated by counting the number of E. coli bacteraemia episodes with susceptibility test results for ciprofloxacin, co-amoxiclav, gentamicin or piperacillin with tazobactam by month and averaging the result for each month with the previous two months, to create a three-month rolling average.
Caveats
Data used for this indicator are from routine voluntary laboratory surveillance schemes, therefore total numbers of E. coli bacteraemia presented in this indicator differ from those presented in the mandatory surveillance scheme indicators.
Combining patient results into one infection episode is limited by the provision of key identifiers by reporting laboratories, so some episodes may be counted more than once if these identifiers enabling grouping and de-duplication are not provided or are provided incorrectly.
The data reflects microbiology results reported to the UK Health Security Agency's routine laboratory surveillance system antimicrobial testing module (SGSS AMR;). Not all laboratories in England were able to report during the indicator time period. As a result, a zero value does not necessarily reflect a lack of testing but could be a lack of reporting in an area.
SGSS is a live reporting database, and therefore data is subject to change and may differ to other published outputs.