 My name is Mark Hansken. I'm a social scientist working at the Center for Tropical Medicine in Global Health in Oxford. But my position is also shared with the Said Business School in Oxford. When it comes to antibiotic use and the behaviour of people in rural Thailand and Laos, I think the biggest challenge is really that we don't understand it well enough. We have a vague notion of what we should do to improve behaviour using communication and education, but there are so many other factors, structural factors like poverty, histories that people have, cultural histories that drive behaviour in a particular way. What do people do when they are sick? What meaning do they attribute to medicines, for instance? What means good care for them? So there are many questions that are really worth answering because it influences so much what we should do and what we can do and what we cannot do to improve behaviour. In rural Thailand and Laos, we carry out the survey to understand health behaviours more generally, the broader pathways that people go through when they are sick, what kinds of public healthcare providers, what kinds of private healthcare providers and informal healthcare providers do they access? What kinds of medicine do they use? How do they even think about medicine and antibiotics? Do they have an understanding of what antibiotics are? Have they heard of drug resistance and what does it mean to them? But also, how does information spread, for instance, in communities? So we don't only have representative surveys, but we also have social network surveys. So we can apply some quite interesting social science research methods to understand and inform something that's quite interesting for the medical sciences. There's a very long tradition of social sciences in medicine, but a communication with the medical sciences. I think that's what's now changing. And I think that's the most important development that we see at the moment, this cross-disciplinary fertilisation that hasn't been done so well in the past. Before we were separate camps, now we're talking more to each other and I think that's where a lot of inspiration comes from and a lot of new impetus for research and also new solutions, solutions beyond healthcare. The practical applications of the work that I do relate, for instance, to a recent study that we had in diagnostic testing. So we contributed to a clinical trial on a diagnostic test, a fingerprint test to help healthcare workers, nurses, basically, and Thailand, Myanmar to prescribe antibiotics better. What we did as social researchers was to contextualise this whole intervention. We could contribute a better understanding of what happens when you introduce this test, how does it change the relationship between nurses and patients, who do you reach, whom do you not reach. Nurses often have already some kind of solution, some kind of tactic and strategy to prescribe or not to prescribe an antibiotic. So this is new test, change the existing behaviours. We social researchers, we have the tools, the techniques and the theories available to answer these questions and that can ultimately make interventions more effective, maybe locally more appropriate, and it can also help us understand what happens during an intervention. Social research complements clinical research rather well, I'd say. Before a clinical trial, for instance, we can help understand the context from a patient perspective, for instance, where to intervene, what is the behaviours that we need to change if we want to change them. In our specific case in a clinical trial about antibiotic use, you cannot simply ask the patient, did you take an antibiotic or not, because they would not understand the question, because they might not know what an antibiotic is. Rather, one would have to ask, for instance, in Thailand, did you take an anti-inflammatory drug? We can help inform these questions. What is more is that by doing population-level research, starting with a general population rather than patients specifically, we can give a broad understanding of the diversity of healthcare behaviours that people have. So if there is, for instance, a clinical trial focusing on, say, primary care in the public sector, then our population-level perspective can help to put this clinical trial into perspective and see on the population level what's the impact, who might be left out, what might be the equity implications, is it fair to do this, and what might we have to do in order to reach, for instance, the poorest of the poor, who might be excluded from the primary care level.