News: AHA publishes resource with strategies and tactics to reduce HAIs

Using tactics made by many hospitals and health systems to reduce healthcare-associated infections (HAI), the American Hospital Association (AHA) has compiled and released a resource for hospitals and health organizations to use in their efforts to improve infection prevention and control.

The four strategies the AHA references are as follows:

1. Build an organizational culture of safety. Focus on engagement at all levels of leadership and care, including clinical and nonclinical teams.
2. Train, retrain and implement infection prevention basics. Focus on foundational infection prevention strategies like hand hygiene, environmental cleaning, competency-based training, audits, and feedback, etc.
3. Use performance improvement tools provided by organizations like the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and American Society for Quality, such as plan-do-study-act, root cause analysis, failure mode and effects analysis, run and control charts, and/or Pareto charts.
4. Use Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tools, such as the Targeted Assessment for Prevention strategy and the Infection Control Assessment and Response program.

The document also provides multiple links throughout to outsourced resources, including HAI prevention tools, CDC tools, and event reporting tools for hospitals to use.

Editor’s note: To access this AHA resource, click here.