This programme will address the public health need to provide evidence for more rationally targeting antibiotics to those most likely to benefit and to develop better antibiotic and non-antibiotic strategies. Acute infections are the commonest conditions managed in primary care, and most people still receive an antibiotic despite limited evidence for their effectiveness. The overuse of antibiotics creates a major threat to the public health - antibiotic resistance. To move patient care forward we need to understand which patients are likely to suffer adversely when antibiotics are not given, assess the impact of infections and their treatment on quality of life, assess the effectiveness of alternative antibiotic prescribing strategies and non antibiotic approaches, and develop easily accessible information for patients. The role of ECS in this project is to develop the infrastructure to provide an interactive web based information system to the trial participants and collect statistics in manor that makes it easy for the researchers to collate and analyse the data.