What are the Main Barriers in the Fight Against HAIs?

Marion A. Kainer, MD, MPH, FRACP, FSHEA, Director of Healthcare Associated Infection and Antimicrobial Resistance Program, Tennessee Department of Health, discusses some of the key points to aid in the fight against healthcare associated infections, nationwide.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“Every front-line healthcare worker has a role to play [and] every action that a front-line healthcare worker does has an impact. I think that we sometimes get too caught up in rates or standardized infection ratios and we forget that there is a person behind every single infection.

The Targeted Assessment for Prevention (TAP) strategy which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has calculates a concrete number of infections that need to be prevented to reach a certain goal. When that concrete number is available to front-line healthcare workers, that really makes a difference in motivating them to go and take the appropriate actions.

We need to work at hospital leadership. [They] need to be engaged and provide the resources to infection control and to their pharmacy departments to make sure that we can implement antimicrobial stewardship. We need to have sufficient infection preventionists to be able to not only collect the data, but act on the data and be on the boards. And then front-line healthcare workers need to be engaged because it really starts with them.”