National Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance to Pseudomonas aeruginosa (PA) and Acinetobacter baumannii (AB) in Saudi Arabia in 2022-2023

funded EpiC Project for Global Health Security, led an assessment focusing on pandemic preparedness and the One Health approach to identify gaps and recommend improvements.Methodology: The Diagnostic Network Assessment (DNA) covered nine core capacities across six laboratory services: HIV, Tuberculosis (TB), Sanitary and Epidemiological Service (SES), Clinical and Diagnostic Service (CDL), Quarantine and Dangerous Infections, and Veterinary Services.The DNA process included pre-assessment, self-assessment, and verification visits to 44 laboratories at various levels.The assessment spanned from February to August 2024.Results: Kyrgyzstan's diagnostic network includes over 340 public health laboratories, but coordination is poor, especially for pandemic preparedness.Private sector laboratories are minimally engaged with the public health system.SES, TB, and HIV labs have better networks than CDL and veterinary services.Key guidelines and policies are outdated, and the network lacks trained staff, adequate infrastructure, data management, and supply chain management.There is no emergency service continuity plan or formal cross-sectoral data sharing.Conclusions: The DNA team provided priority recommendations including enhancing cross sectoral coordination, developing 7-1-7 strategy and emergency operational plans for laboratory services, update outdated policies and guidelines amongst others.The EpiC Kyrgyzstan team will collaborate with local stakeholders to address these gaps and strengthen the country's preparedness and response capacity to infectious disease outbreaks.This will include: supporting the development of guidelines and SOPs on biosafety and biosecurity, especially on specimen transportation system and medical waste management; technical assistance to conduct cascade trainings for laboratory staff to improve their skills and knowledge to use the developed guidelines and integrating this training programme into the curriculum of the national postgraduate education center.EpiC will also work to strengthen the local engineers' capacity on laboratory equipment maintenance to enable timely innovative laboratory testing such as genomic sequencing within One Health approach.