Taking action against hospital acquired infection
July 01, 2008
Patients enter hospitals every day for a variety of reasons but
usually without the thought of developing a new health problem. Yet
every year thousands of hospitalized Americans acquire infections
during hospital stays, causing risk of complications, prolonged stays
and an increased burden on the health-care system.
With fast track funding by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and
Quality, five research collaboratives comprised of over 70 academic
medical centers, community hospital systems, and other health-care
organizations from across the nation are investigating various
strategies to prevent these infections, which can range from
bothersome to deadly. But what approaches work the best and in what
settings? And how can effective change be implemented and spread?
Researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine, the
Regenstrief Institute, Inc., the Roudebush VA Medical Center and the
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis School of
Engineering and Technology have been tapped by AHRQ to serve as the
national resource center for its multiple collaborative work to
prevent hospital acquired infection. Indiana researchers will work to
develop data collection tools and collect information to provide
technical assistance as well as to identify effective implementation
strategies developed by the five hospital acquired infection
prevention collaboratives.
The Indianapolis-based team will use their expertise with the tools of
evidence-based medicine, informatics and systems engineering to help
the hospital-acquired infection collaboratives determine what are the
best practices and how best to implement these practices at hospitals
large and small, urban and rural, public and private.
"We are excited to have the op****tunity to learn from the efforts of
multiple collaborative groups to find out what works in actual
practice and how to implement these solutions," said Bradley N.
Doebbeling, M.D., M.Sc., who leads the group which will be evaluating
the collaboratives' recommendations. He is director of Health Services
Research at the Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; director of the Indiana
University Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research; professor
of health services research and medicine at the Indiana University
School of Medicine; and director of the VA Health Services Research
and Development Center of Excellence, Indianapolis VA Medical Center.
Dr. Doebbeling is joined in this effort by Jaime Workman, M.S.,
associate professor of technology, School of Engineering and
Technology, IUPUI; Heather Hagg, M.S., research scientist at the VA
Center of Excellence; Mindy Flanagan, Ph.D., research scientist, IU
Center for Health Services & Outcomes Research, Regenstrief Institute,
Shawn Hoke, B.A., senior program manager, Regenstrief Institute, and
others.
"So often collaboratives are formed to improve health care,
recommendations are made and then carried out but no evaluation is
completed, so lessons about what works remain unlearned," Dr.
Doebbeling noted. "Over the next 18 months our health services
researchers, systems engineers, informaticists, infectious disease
experts, doctors and nurses will help the collaboratives collect data
in forms that will enable our multi-expertise team to compare apples
to apples so we can effectively evaluate different approaches to
infection control at the 72 health-care institutions studied by the
five collaboratives. This is an exciting op****tunity to use this
funding from AHRQ to sup****t and learn from the multiple
collaboratives of hospitals, clinicians and researchers working
together to prevent hospital acquired infections across the United
States."
The ultimate goal is to share lessons learned about successes,
barriers and challenges in implementing and maintaining strategies
that decrease the likelihood of patients acquiring an infection during
a hospital stay.
Source: Indiana University
This news is brought to you by PhysOrg.com
URL: http://www.physorg.com/news134129181.html
|
