Singing and dancing pills are the latest weapon to be pulled out of the NHS’s public health armoury, in a last-ditch battle to beat antibiotic resistance. The animated capsules are featured in Public Health England’s Keep Antibiotics Working campaign, which was unveiled earlier this week, and aims to encourage patients to use fewer antibiotics. Yet like all other attempts to curb the impending antibiotic Armageddon, it will fail. Why? Because it is based on the lazy assumption that patients are to blame.

We should be in a strong position to curb the threat of antimicrobial resistance in the UK, as our comparatively non-interventionist approach to illness (necessitated by having one of the lowest spends per capita on healthcare in the western world) has meant we have a much stronger grip on prescribing than many other places. This is admirable and should be celebrated more than it is, yet this is exactly why a campaign encouraging people to use fewer antibiotics is destined to fail. Patients aren’t the decision-makers here.

The power lies with doctors, who have for far too long been forced to condense the complex, costly and time-consuming matter of improving their patients’ health into 10-minute slots – slots that probably took the patient weeks to obtain. When the NHS was born 70 years ago, its affordability was made possible due to the relatively new availability of effective, cheap antibiotics which paved the way for a high-impact, low-cost model of care. That world no longer exists, and our failure to acknowledge that could be the end of us.

Instead doctors have continued to overprescribe antibiotics at an alarming rate, despite warnings about antimicrobial resistance going back as far as the 1980s, when antibiotic resistance tracking was first set up by the World Health Organisation.

If only there had been a routine, 10-minute test introduced then, to tell you and your GP if the microbes they had just swabbed from your sore, angry tonsils were viral, or bacterial. I wonder if then you would have ever “nagged” for broad-spectrum antibiotics in the first place? Rather than demanding effective testing and specific treatments for our infections, we have instead accepted quick fixes that have only made the situation worse.

Improving pay and prestige not only for the microbiologists working on developing diagnostic testing, but also that of the cleaners, nurses and infectious disease specialists working in our hospitals, was cited as essential in a review released last year. The antimicrobial resistance taskforce that produced the review was set up as part of a surprisingly insightful move by David Cameron, to take a long-term approach to tackling this threat. Despite this pertinent warning, nurses continue the fight to end the cap on their pay, and hospital cleaners staged their biggest ever strike this summer. The government still isn’t listening.

Yet the NHS and its staff cannot be expected to solve all of society’s ills any more than patients can. We all know that cold winters cause a spike in respiratory tract infections, but the rate of hospital admission for chronic lower respiratory diseases has been 40% higher in England than it is in Sweden, despite their colder winters. This is no surprise when you learn you are nearly twice as likely to live in substandard housing here than there. The architects of our housing crisis – the government – are a key part of this problem. No realistic attempts to reduce antibiotic use can be made until we have begun taking reasonable measures to prevent infection in the first place.

We also can’t ignore the fact that antimicrobial resistance is a global problem. Using antibiotics as growth agents has been banned in the EU since 2006, but it isn’t in the US. It is suspected, though not yet proven, that antibiotic use in animals can lead to antibiotic resistance in humans.

The misuse, and lack of regulation, of antibiotic medicines in other parts of the world is also contributing to growing antibiotic resistance. The Ebola crisis three years ago showed why we need to be less insular in our approach to infectious disease, or face the dire consequences.

First of all however, we need to acknowledge that few of these things are in the control of someone who is “feeling under the weather”. Public Health England must stop pretending that they are.

• Hannah Flynn is a health and science journalist. She has worked for a number of leading national trade publications for healthcare professionals, including Chemist+Druggist and Nursing Standard