UK review finds almost no quality-assured patient education materials exist for home intravenous antibiotic therapy

A grey-literature review, led by a group of UK NHS pharmacy teams, assessed 36 candidate online resources for outpatient parenteral antimicrobial therapy (OPAT) against basic quality criteria; only 9 met the criteria, and just 2 were designed specifically for patients rather than healthcare professionals — both informal rather than formally accredited resources Synthesis (Watson et al.1).

As a review of publicly available grey-literature material, the finding describes what currently exists to be found rather than testing whether any existing resource actually improves patient understanding or adherence; that question was outside its scope.

For OPAT services, this identifies a concrete, low-cost and immediately actionable gap: a service cannot assume quality-assured patient education material already exists to draw on, and would need to develop or commission its own rather than searching further for something already validated.