Consultation dates: 18 February to 17 March 2015

We are now consulting registered stakeholders on the draft guideline Antimicrobial stewardship and would like to hear from you.

How to comment

1.Register as a stakeholder

Your organisation needs to be registered as a stakeholder.

You can still register if you haven't done this already. If you do not belong to an organisation that can register as a stakeholder, we recommend that you contact the registered stakeholder organisation that most closely represents your interests and pass your comments to them.

2. Read the consultation documents

Consultation Documents

• Draft guideline: this describes the evidence and views that have been considered, and sets out the draft recommendations that have been developed by the Committee.
• Short version of draft guideline: this contains the draft recommendations (without the evidence).
• Appendices
• Comments form

Other information about the consultation

• Equality impact assessment
• Developing NICE guidelines: how to get involved

3. Make your comments and submit them

Areas to comment on

• Which areas will have the biggest impact on practice or be challenging to implement? Please tell us for whom and why.
• What would help users overcome any challenges?
• In line with the guideline scope, interventions targeting both practitioner and patient have not been included as it is difficult to determine which of these interventions is having an effect. Please comment.
• Developing NICE guidelines: how to get involved has suggestions of other areas to comment on.

Submitting comments

If your organisation and another registered stakeholder have similar views on the guideline, we encourage you to send a joint response from 1 organisation. The other organisations should then respond separately, endorsing the comments.

Please submit comments to amsguidance@nice.org.uk by 5pm on 17 March 2015 at the latest.

Checklist for submitting comments

• Use the comment form and submit it as a Word document (not a PDF).
• Combine all comments from your organisation into 1 response. We cannot accept more than 1 response from each organisation.
• Underline and highlight any confidential information or other material that you do not wish to be made public.
• Do not include medical information about yourself or another person from which you or the person could be identified.
• For copyright reasons, comment forms do not include attachments such as research articles, letters or leaflets (for copyright reasons). We return comments forms that have attachments without reading them. The stakeholder may resubmit the form without attachments, but it must be received by the deadline.

What happens next

• The Guideline development group will consider all the comments when revising the guideline. Comments from registered stakeholders and responses to the comments will be published alongside the final guideline on the NICE website.
• If you submit comments directly (not through a stakeholder organisation), the Guideline development group will still consider your comments when revising the guideline, but will not respond to them or publish them on the website.
• Comments about implementation will be used to help develop implementation support for the final guideline.
• We cannot consider any comments that arrive after the deadline, or are not on the comments form.
• Two weeks before publication, we will send the final guideline, comments and responses, and the final equality assessment to registered stakeholder organisations that submit comments during this consultation (or send an email to indicate ‘no comment'). This step is to allow stakeholders to tell us about any substantive errors before publication. The guideline will be released only to registered stakeholders who have agreed to the NICE confidentiality acknowledgement and undertaking.

Progress of this guideline topic so far.

Note: We reserve the right to summarise and edit comments received during consultations, or not to publish them at all, if we consider the comments are too long, or publication would be unlawful or otherwise inappropriate.

Comments received during our consultations are published in the interests of openness and transparency, and to promote understanding of how recommendations are developed. The comments are published as a record of the comments we received, and are not endorsed by NICE, its officers or advisory Committees.