Exploring antimicrobial stewardship education and training support for community pharmacists in the United Kingdom

A key objective of both the World Health Organisation (WHO) Global Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) (World Health Organisation [WHO], Citation2016) and the UK national action plan (Department of Health and Social Care et al, Citation2024) is to improve awareness and understanding through effective communication, education, and training (Cooke, Citation2022). Successful initiatives promoting Antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) in community healthcare organisations in England include national programmes (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence [NICE], Citation2015) and toolkits such as the Treat Antibiotics Responsibly, Guidance, Education, and Tools (TARGET) (Parekh et al., Citation2023b) and the Antibiotic Guardian campaign (Ashiru-Oredope et al., Citation2018; Seaton et al., Citation2022). In England, the Pharmacy Quality Scheme (PQS) incentivises AMS activity in community pharmacies. Since 2021/22, it has mandated the use of the TARGET antibiotic checklist, which supports pharmacist review of each prescribed antibiotic (Hayes et al., Citation2023).