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This document is intended as a guide for infection control professionals in acute and long-term care, to ensure that the critical elements and methods of surveillance for health care-associated infections (HAIs) are incorporated into their practice. It provides guidance for each of the building blocks of the surveillance system including planning, data collection, interpretation, analysis and communication, to inform infection prevention and control practices that will result in effective surveillance in hospitals and long-term care homes. The best practices for surveillance described in this document should assist acute and long-term care settings in Ontario in establishing surveillance systems. Effective surveillance should lead to process improvements that will result in decreases in HAI rates, morbidity, mortality and health care costs. Although the primary audience for this document comprises those directly involved in surveillance, it also serves as a resource for anyone seeking to improve their understanding of best practices in nosocomial infection surveillance. The best practices in this document recommend a standardized approach to the surveillance of health care-associated infections that will allow for the comparison of rates within facilities, across facilities as well as comparison to provincial and national benchmarks. This document forms one component of an effort to enhance patient safety and improve the quality of health care in Ontario. (NEW) In October 2011, the Provincial Infectious Diseases Advisory Committee on Surveillance updated this best practice document, first published in June 2008, to assist infection prevention and control professionals to develop and implement their surveillance programs in a manner that will permit comparisons with their peers and allow them to quickly detect early increases in health care-associated infections that may indicate the presence of an outbreak.
The principles and practices recommended in this document are a synthesis of the best available scientific evidence and expert opinion of professionals from the fields of infectious diseases, infection prevention and control, public health and epidemiology. It is our intention that as new information becomes available; recommendations in this document will be reviewed and updated.
This document applies to these health care settings:
This document does not apply to these health care settings:
Click below to download Best Practices for Surveillance of Health Care-Associated Infections in Patient and Resident Populations (109 pages, PDF, 1.4 MB). English
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