Best practices for IPs and anyone who cares for patients with C. difficile or in facilities with patients who are being treated for C. difficile infections (CDI).

Practice guidance for the elimination of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) transmission in hospital settings.

Summary of the latest studies, outbreak experiences, applicable guidelines, and tools to manage and eliminate transmission of multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (MDR Ab) in healthcare settings.

Comprehensive strategies for eliminating MRSA across the entire spectrum of long-term care (LTC) facilities.

Available to members.

CDC’s overview page

CDC’s educational effort, Be Antibiotics Aware, aims to improve antibiotic prescribing and use among consumer and healthcare professional audiences to protect patient safety and combat drug resistance.

In 2014, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched a new set of core elements for acute-care hospitals to implement key strategies in antimicrobial stewardship (AS).

CDC’s Core Elements of Antibiotic Stewardship offer providers and facilities a set of key principles to guide efforts to improve antibiotic use and, therefore, advance patient safety and improve outcomes.

Tips and advice for use of antibiotics.

Healthcare professionals can earn continuing education (CE) through these antimicrobial resistance and antibiotic stewardship trainings.

Healthcare professionals and partner organizations—including health departments and professional societies — can review and share the Antibiotic Stewardship Resource Bundles as part of their organization’s U.S. Antibiotic Awareness Week promotion efforts.

Antimicrobial Stewardship Toolkit.

Member States have requested WHO policy guidance on how to facilitate the implementation of national AMS activities in an integrated and programmatic approach. This policy guidance responds to that demand from Member States and is anchored in public health guiding principles in the human health sector.

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are the most common type of healthcare-associated infection (HAI), the majority of which are associated with an indwelling urinary catheter (IUC).

People receiving medical care can get serious infections called healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), which may lead to sepsis or death. Hospitals report common HAIs to CDC, including infections caused by C. difficile, infections following surgery, and infections following placement of a tube in the bladder or a large vein (catheter).

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

During the past several years a great deal of work has been accomplished nationwide on the development and use of performance measures.

Vascular access device-associated bloodstream infections (VADA BSI) are largely avoidable. The goal must be prevention rather than simply to identify and treat these infections.

Oncology patients and other immunocompromised populations are at increased risk for acquiring healthcare-associated infections because of their underlying disease processes and/or treatment regimens that result in neutropenia and impaired immune response.

Critical care units provide an opportunistic setting for healthcare-acquired infections (HAIs).

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The New England Journal of Medicine

Although infection prevention traditionally has approached the problem of resistance primarily from the aspect of preventing transmission from an infected patient to a noninfected patient, more needs to be done to improve how antimicrobials are commonly used.

Clostridium difficile Infection and Pseudomembranous Colitis

Summary of APIC’s March 2013 C. difficile Educational and Consensus Conference.

Infection preventionists have a role in accelerating progress toward preventing the emergence and cross-transmission of MDROs.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Archive

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Archive

Illinois Campaign to Eliminate Clostridium difficile

Greater New York Hospital Association United Hospital Fund

Currently, no single U.S. surveillance system can provide estimates of the burden of all types of health care–associated infections across acute care patient populations. We conducted a prevalence survey in 10 geographically diverse states to determine the prevalence of health care–associated infections in acute care hospitals and generate updated estimates of the national burden of such infections.

Hospital stays from C. difficile infections tripled in the last decade, posing a patient safety threat especially harmful to older Americans.

Although infection prevention traditionally has approached the problem of resistance primarily from the aspect of preventing transmission from an infected patient to a noninfected patient, more needs to be done to improve how antimicrobials are commonly used

Enterobacteriaceae are a large, diverse group of facultative Gram-negative rods, recovered as natural inhabitants of the environment and the large intestines of humans and animals.

Fall 2014, CRE outbreak in Israel

A microbiological overview of carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae.

Aseptic Technique from APIC Text Online.

All invasive procedures involve contact by a medical device or surgical instrument with a patient’s sterile tissue or mucous membranes. The level of disinfection or sterilization is dependent on the intended use of the object: critical (items that contact sterile tissue such as surgical instruments), semicritical (items that contact mucous membrane such as endoscopes), and noncritical (devices that contact only intact skin such as stethoscopes) items require sterilization, high-level disinfection, and low-level disinfection, respectively.

As environmental, resource, and financial sustainability efforts take a more prominent role in healthcare, reprocessing single-use devices (SUDs) is one strategy considered or implemented by healthcare facilities.

Sterile processing is the area responsible for reprocessing instrumentation and other reusable medical devices. The process involves handling, collecting, transporting, sorting, disassembling, cleaning, disinfecting, inspecting, packaging, sterilizing, storing, and distributing reprocessed items.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC).

This guidance provides recommendations for the formulation and scientific validation of reprocessing instructions for reusable medical devices.

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, issued 8/29/2014

Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.

Association of periOperative Registered Nurses.

Environmental cleaning and disinfection are essential for maintaining a safe patient environment.

There is an increased awareness of the relationship between effective environmental hygiene programs and infection prevention, patient harm reduction, and HCP safety.

Infection preventionists have varying levels of involvement with healthcare waste management and are often focused on regulated medical waste. The categories of regulated medical waste streams of particular interest to infection preventionists include infectious waste, pathological waste, and sharps waste.

Environmental services guidelines from the Guidelines for Environmental Infection Control in Health-Care Facilities (2003).

Environmental services (EVS) personnel have the shared responsibility to help stop healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) from spreading by working with colleagues, prioritizing areas that pose immediate safety risks, and following guidelines for cleaning and disinfecting. This interactive training illustrates the important role EVS personnel have in the prevention of HAIs.

Hospitals must maintain a clean environment and reduce germ exposure to keep patients, visitors and healthcare personnel safe.

This chapter provides the current best practices for environmental cleaning procedures in patient care areas, as well as cleaning for specific situations (e.g., blood spills) and for noncritical patient care equipment.

As part of the Project Firstline initiative, the AHA and AHE have released two cleaning and disinfecting job aids for frontline EVS professionals and their supervisors to use in their efforts to practice proper cleaning and disinfection in a variety of health care settings.

Environmental cleaning and infection prevention and control in health care facilities in low- and middle-income countries

Multiple Resources, Guidelines for Environmental Infection Control in Health-Care Facilities

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Minimum expectations.

Resource from the Occupational Safety & Health Administration

Many organizations have produced guidance documents for responding to Legionnaires’ disease outbreaks and maintaining water safety

Northern Arizona Regional Behavioral Health Authority

Premier Medical Group

Massachusetts General Hospital

Clinica Sierra Vista

Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation

American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers

Facility Guidelines Institute

Michigan Department of Community Health

From the AHRQ Safety Program for Ambulatory Surgery (funded by AHRQ, developed by APIC and HRET)

Hand hygiene is a critical component of patient and employee safety. Effective patient safety and infection prevention and control programs require that healthcare personnel be familiar with hand hygiene recommendations and consistently adhere to them.

Standard Precautions outline the minimum set of interventions considered fundamental standards of care that prevent the transmission of microorganisms. They provide a foundation for infection prevention measures and apply to every location and setting in which healthcare services are delivered.

Infection prevention barrier precautions provide a foundation for infection prevention practices that span the spectrum of healthcare settings. Modern healthcare delivery has expanded from the traditional hospital to other settings that include home care, ambulatory care, freestanding specialty care sites, and long-term care.

APIC Text chapter on Aseptic Technique.

People receiving medical care can get serious infections called healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), which may lead to sepsis or death. Hospitals report common HAIs to CDC, including infections caused by C. difficile, infections following surgery, and infections following placement of a tube in the bladder or a large vein (catheter).

Hands have good germs that your body needs to stay healthy. Hands can also have bad germs on them that make you sick.

To succeed in IPC and bring about safer, high quality health care practices, implementation at the point of care is critical. Looking to the future, development and maintenance of implementation plans to translate recommendations into practice must be a key focus for everyone.

There are many challenges facing Infection Preventionists (IPs) in long-term care facilities (LTCFs). Residents within LTCFs require either short-term rehabilitative support after surgery, injury, or illness, or long-term physical, cognitive, or social support not available to them in the general community.

Within the healthcare continuum, long-term acute care hospitals (LTACHs) have the unique ability to provide flexibility for healthcare personnel and their patients who need long-term care for complex conditions.

Epidemiology—the study of the frequency, distribution, cause, and control of disease in populations—forms the basis of all health-related studies. It provides the background for interventions to reduce transmission of infectious organisms, reduce the number of healthcare-associated infections, and protect healthcare personnel from infection.

Surveillance is of paramount significance in infection prevention programs. This chapter discusses the history, evolution, and critical elements of surveillance programs in healthcare settings to improve patient safety and quality improvement.

Use the Long Term Care Facility (LTCF) Component to track infections and prevention process measures, systematically, to identify problems, improve care, and determine progress toward national healthcare-associated infection goals.

If you live in a nursing home, assisted living facility or other long-term care facility, you have a higher risk of getting an infection. There are steps you can take to reduce your risk.

Increasing Influenza Vaccination among Health Care Personnel in Long-term Care Settings.

The toolkits cover a variety of interventions that nursing homes can use to improve antibiotic use.

Although infection prevention traditionally has approached the problem of resistance primarily from the aspect of preventing transmission from an infected patient to a noninfected patient, more needs to be done to improve how antimicrobials are commonly used.

The genus Staphylococcuscomprises more than 40 validly described species, with the coagulase-positive species Staphylococcus aureusand the coagulase-negative species S. epidermidisand S. haemolyticusas the most common causes of healthcare-associated infections caused by staphylococci.

People receiving medical care can get serious infections called healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), which may lead to sepsis or death.

Both targeted decolonization and universal decolonization of patients in intensive care units (ICUs) are candidate strategies to prevent health care–associated infections, particularly those caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

The REDUCE MRSA Trial (Randomized Evaluation of Decolonization vs. Universal Clearance to Eliminate Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus) found that universal decolonization was the most effective intervention to reduce MRSA infections.

This chapter describes the principal concepts regarding pneumonia and defines each type of pneumonia, epidemiology, pathogenesis, etiology, antimicrobial therapy, surveillance, and prevention measures.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the potential for severe pulmonary complications has highlighted how the Respiratory Care Services (RCS) department plays an integral role with the treatment team and promoting patient safety.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

This chapter describes the principal concepts regarding pneumonia and defines each type of pneumonia, epidemiology, pathogenesis, etiology, antimicrobial therapy, surveillance, and prevention measures.

Bordetella pertussis (B. pertussis) is a bacterium responsible for the disease commonly known as pertussis, or “whooping cough.” Pertussis is highly communicable and easily transmitted. It is most common among young children and a serious health threat to unvaccinated or under-vaccinated infants.

Influenza viruses cause an acute respiratory illness, which is experienced annually by millions of people with tens of thousands of deaths. Risk for more severe outcomes is greater among the youngest and oldest patients, those who are pregnant, and patients with underlying chronic health conditions

Common childhood diseases that can be controlled with vaccines.

The purpose of this chapter is to review the epidemiology, description, pathogenesis, clinical features, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of viral Hepatitis A–E.

This chapter describes the critical concepts surrounding the immunization of healthcare personnel (HCP), including the types of vaccines, immunological principles, occupational health considerations, and preventive measures.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The World Health Organization