ABOUT

NIHR Health Protection research unit in healthcare associated infections and antimicrobial resistance

The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) has provided funding to establish 13 Health Protection Research Units (HPRU) to address key public health threats. The HPRUs are partnerships between Universities and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) forming multi-disciplinary centres of excellence with a focus on collaborations and knowledge sharing.

The NIHR HPRU in Healthcare Associated Infections and Antimicrobial Resistance is a partnership between UKHSA and the University of Oxford in collaboration with the Universities of Bristol, Leeds, and Nottingham. It is led by Professor Professor Sarah Walker and the UKHSA lead is Dr Colin Brown.

The NIHR HPRU in Healthcare Associated Infections and Antimicrobial Resistance was established at the University of Oxford in April 2024 and was renewed again in 2025 for a further 5 years.

The vision of the HPRU is to find original and creative ways to combat the major threats posed by healthcare-associated infections and antimicrobial resistance. We will build on the best of our world-leading research, systems, and tools developed over 10 years of working between partner universities and UKHSA.

We will work out new ways to detect problems faster and more efficiently, discovering who needs protecting most and finding better ways to do this.

Our research will apply to everyone living in England, and cover whole patient journeys across homes, pharmacies, general practices, ‘hospital-at-home’, and hospitals.

Our Key collaborators are:

University of Bristol
University of Leeds
University of Nottingham

We are bringing world class researchers together over 4 broad themes:

Optimising surveillance

Work out how information collected every time people go to hospital or their GP can be used to track infections and antimicrobial resistance. Using this detailed information about patients, test results, treatments, and the microbes causing infections will help make healthcare safer and protect the whole population.

Establishing population impact

Understand better who is most affected by healthcare-associated infections and antimicrobial resistance and why. We will carefully consider vulnerable groups, socio-economic factors, health conditions, and aging. We will use this information to work out the best ways to reduce infections and resistance that the NHS can afford. Our approaches will also reduce unfair and avoidable differences between groups.

Advancing stewardship approaches

Explore how to use antibiotics better outside of hospitals. We will look at using antibiotics and tests for infections differently, and changing the ways healthcare staff relate to patients (e.g., telephone appointments or hubs for acute chest infections). We aim to empower patients to manage their health and antibiotic use.

Mitigating Gram-negative infections

Improve how we manage one of the most challenging and resistant types of infection, ‘Gram-negative’ infections, which can come from our guts or the environment. We will use models to work out which interventions make infections less likely and use genetic information to understand what makes some microbes resistant and others not. We will study hospital wastewater to discover what role the hospital environment plays in spreading these infections and whether we can engineer hospitals better to limit microbes spreading.