Table 4.

Main recommendations for improvement following the OASIS evaluation of RESAPATH in 2018

Functional sections	Recommendations
Objectives and scope of surveillance	Give more details in the formulation of the surveillance objectives and highlight the main objective to follow AMR (description of current situation and trend analyses).
Central institutional organisation	Include in the steering committee representatives of veterinary practitioners working with horses and companion animals, an AMR expert from the medical field (e.g. the head of a surveillance network) and veterinary experts for antimicrobial therapy. Increase resources to enable RESAPATH to include more laboratories, develop communication and training activities and analyse more samples at the molecular level.
Field institutional organisation	Closely follow field issues that may lead to a decrease in the number of AST results collected from member laboratories (development of rapid diagnostic tests performed in veterinary clinics, less frequent sample pick up from local laboratories, etc.).
Laboratory	Encourage laboratories at submitting data every three months.
Surveillance tools	Raise awareness among veterinarians on the need to submit epidemiological data to their laboratories. Disseminate sampling and storing procedures to veterinarians via their laboratory.
Surveillance procedures	Quantify the sampling bias linked to the fact that veterinarians may usually sample animals in specific contexts (e.g. after treatment failure). Identify and test solutions that could limit the sampling bias (if any), e.g. by asking vets in sample forms if the AST is ordered following an antimicrobial therapy failure, and then by analysing data coming only from animals for which the answer is ‘No’.
Data management	Set up an electronic data interchange between field laboratories and ANSES. Merge the two databases of Lyon and Ploufragan–Plouzané–Niort and keep the database management system of Lyon which is more secure.
Training	Organise one or two fixed-date training sessions per year for the staff of member laboratories. Upload a video tutorial on the disk diffusion technique according to the French norm NF U47-107 on the RESAPATH website.
Communication	Distribute a trimonthly newsletter to member laboratories containing summaries of research papers based on data from RESAPATH, as well as scientific and regulatory news regarding AMR.
Evaluation and performance indicators	Add a performance indicator on compliance by laboratories on quarterly data submission to ANSES to motivate laboratories at sending more often their data. Add a performance indicator on the proportion of isolates for which a list of epidemiological data (to be defined) is indeed received by ANSES. This would enable the evaluation of the completeness of the data collected by veterinarians and then submitted by laboratories.