CDC Launches Prevalence Survey to Estimate HAI Burden in US Nursing Homes

Nicola Thompson, PhD, Epidemiologist, Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), discusses the next step in implementing a prevalence survey to estimate national burden of HAIs in US nursing homes.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“Right now, the CDC is partnering with our Emerging Infections Program (the EIP). This is a long-standing program that the CDC has had, where we partner with 10 state health departments across the country and their academic collaborators. Through this Emerging Infections Program, during the course of this year, 2017, we plan to do a prevalence survey of healthcare [associated] infections in nursing homes.

We’re looking to recruit 150 and 200 nursing homes to participate in this project. From this large-scale project, where we have a large number of nursing homes participating, we’re using our partners in the Emerging Infections Program who are experts in surveillance and collecting information through record reviews. Our partners will be going into nursing homes, reviewing records, and collecting this information and then applying the information that was collected to a standardized set of surveillance definitions. The revised McGeer definitions were published in 2012, which helped identify infections through surveillance in nursing home settings.

We hope that by using this very robust infrastructure, these highly trained surveillance offices, and these standardized infection definitions, we’ll be able to generate the type of data that we feel like we need to be able to develop a model that will give us more robust and precise estimates of the number of infections that occur in nursing homes in the US.”