The National Health Service recognises the importance of research, teaching, and training to
the future success of the organisation and medical students are expected to qualify with the
necessary clinical, professional, and academic skills to support this. There is a wide variation
in the level of cross-specialty engagement with Antimicrobial Stewardship (AMS) &
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) research at UK and international state-of-the-art
conferences, with a heterogeneous level of importance also attributed amongst undergraduate
and postgraduate training pathways across clinical medicine. It therefore seems apparent that
the AMS-AMR agenda needs to be promoted from within specialties, rather than being
‘pushed’ on them as an external agenda, to promote broad ownership and capacity within all
clinical specialties that use antimicrobials. This must start early during undergraduate medical
training. We investigated whether the use of an online platform designed to facilitate medical
student research projects could be utilised to promote undergraduate engagement with AMSAMR
at Imperial College School of Medicine between July 2015 and 2016. During this
period 12 applicants were appointed to 11 of the 13 advertised projects. So far, students
undertaking these projects have achieved: 1 peer-reviewed publication, 3 national oral
presentations, 1 national prize, 1 international poster presentation, 3 national poster
presentations, and 2 further manuscripts are currently under peer-review. Furthermore,
despite the students’ broad career interests there has been a high retention rate with students
requesting involvement in further AMS-AMR related activities. Further longitudinal
assessment of this tool for promoting undergraduate engagement with AMS-AMR research is
now being explored.