CARe Centre for Antibiotic Resistance Research

Name of the research center:

CARe Centre for Antibiotic Resistance Research

Implementation of SDG-focused research centers

The School of Business, Economics and Law was founded in 1923 as a private business school and became part of the University of Gothenburg in 1971. Today, the School comprises four departments: Business Administration, Economics, Law, and Economy and Society (including Economic History, Human Geography, and Innovation and Entrepreneurship). This disciplinary breadth is considered one of the School’s many strengths. The School also hosts a number of research centers and other units, such as the Gothenburg Research Institute and the international research network EfD (Environment for Development). The School has 6,900 students, close to 500 employees, and over 160 international partner universities. The research is characterized by collaboration across geographical, institutional, and disciplinary boundaries and the School works closely with both business and the public sector. The School of Business, Economics and Law is accredited by EQUIS, AACSB and AMBA – the “Triple Crown.”

The Schools mission is to “develop knowledge, educate, and foster independent thinking for a sustainable world”. This wide and overarching mission mean that sustainability cannot has be delegated to a single position, center or department. It has to be interpreted and implemented throughout school. With that said the Deputy Dean with responsibility for Sustainability has, however, a special role in this implementation. The Deputy Dean is heading the Council for Sustainable Development with one researcher from each department, a sustainability coordinator and project manager for the School Specific Sustainability Days as well as student representatives. The Council for Sustainable Development organizes Specific Sustainability Days for students, Days for faculty and are responsible and international cooperation within PRME and other networks. The Council for Sustainable Development include sub-grops for education (the largest) and sub-groups for enhancing sustainability research (eg. trough workshops) and a sub-group for outreach that host events with the business other organizations on sustainability.

In which ways is research fostered, motivated, or incentivized by leadership in the institution

In our institution, as in most academic institutions in this part of the world, the Faculty management generally has a very limited role in affecting what research is being conducted. The specific project in this example, however, is clearly a strategic and focused initiative called “UGOT Challenges”, a 30 million dollar initiative to develop transdisciplinary research centers with focus on global challenges. The school have been involved in all the six centers but perhaps especially and with leading roles in Cecar – Center for Collective Action Research, CARe with a focus on socioeconomic cost on global scale related to antibiotic resistance and in FRAM where the school contribute especially within the climate-, environmental-, and behavioral economics.

Main focus of the center's work

CARe: Centre for Antibiotic Resistance Research at the University of Gothenburg

CARe has a vision to limit mortality, morbidity, and socioeconomic costs related to antibiotic resistance on a global scale through research. CARe is an interdisciplinary research center where a majority of the researchers are from natural sciences and medicine. However, we are a smaller group of researchers from social sciences the humanities and, mostly working with policy interventions to combat antibiotic resistance. Interventions are important tools in the work of combatting resistance since overuse of antibiotics is the most important driver of the development of resistance. And since we do not have any good news about new antibiotics, appropriate usage of antibiotics is even more important.

When summarizing the research we have done in economics at CARe, we have especially studied how to combat antibiotic resistance with behavioral changes. We have studied whether the general public uses antibiotics correctly and what affects their antibiotics consumption. For example, we have investigated people’s willingness to accept physicians’ decisions not to prescribe antibiotics and the willingness to limit personal use of antibiotics voluntarily (link to the paper). We found that 53% of our sample state that they would be willing to accept a physician’s decision not to prescribe antibiotics, despite disagreeing with the decision, and trust in the health care system is significantly associated with acceptance. When it comes to people’s willingness to voluntarily abstain from using antibiotics, a majority stated that they are willing not to take antibiotics.

Secondly, we have studied doctors and nurses and whether they follow the guidelines of antibiotics prescription correctly. We have also investigated how different kinds of norms and attitudes about antibiotics use affect a doctor´s decision to prescribe antibiotics. We found that perceived willingness to prescribe among peer doctors and adherence to guidelines are linked to the likelihood to prescribe, but that doctors are less likely to abstain from taking antibiotics compared with the general public. We have furthermore investigated whether specific interventions directed to healthcare centers such as information visit and self-evaluation have affected antibiotic prescriptions in primary healthcare and found that the interventions have played a very limited role for the reduction in prescriptions (link to the paper).

And lastly, we have also investigated consumers´ demand for antibiotics produced in more environmentally friendly ways as well as consumers´ demand for safe food. We found that consumers will pay high price premiums for both antibiotics produced in more environmentally friendly ways and for labels informing about antibiotics use in food production, indicating that consumer demand is one channel to use for combating the large scale problem of antibiotics resistance.

How many sustainability/SDG-oriented publications are produced by the center(s) each year on average? Please separate your response into peer-reviewed articles and other publications.

Around 220 peer reviewed publications since 2016

Full list here: https://www.gu.se/en/care/publications

Explain briefly how research carried out in the center feeds into teaching, giving examples of modules/courses or related degree programmes.

At the School one very important example is that Elina Lampi host a mandatory sustainability course for all Business and Economics program students that include economic and behavioural perspectives on antiboitic resistance.