BRATTLEBORO — Every Vermont hospital, as well as Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and most of the state's nursing homes, have joined together with the Vermont Department of Health, the Vermont Program for Quality in Health Care, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in a statewide collaborative to prevent health care-associated infections such as MRSA (multidrug-resistant Staph aureus).
Brattleboro Memorial Hospital is working with Brattleboro Retreat, Grace Cottage Hospital, and local nursing homes in a group they call The Windham County Healthcare Cluster Intervention Team. Together, they are trying to find ways to prevent healthcare-associated infections locally.
According to BMH infection control and risk manager Jan Puchalski, Vermont hospitals “were well prepared to initiate this process because we are already tracking statewide hospital infections and reporting them publicly through the CDC and the National Healthcare Safety Network. BMH has been involved in adopting best practices and interventions to reduce central line infections and ventilator associated pneumonias in the special care unit and have achieved and maintained a zero infection rate for 2009 and 2010.”
In particular, this local Healthcare Cluster Intervention Team is looking to increase compliance with hand hygiene in all aspects of the health care institutions. In addition, the group is working on standardizing infection control policies, education, and compliance.
In order to have success with these initiatives, and for a number of other reasons, this intervention team is also looking at improving communication within and between these local health care facilities.
This initiative is exciting in that we are from all different institutions and hence bring to the table our expertise and what we know and have learned so we don't have to re-invent the wheel in this process,” said Puchalski. “We are noting the differences in environments we each deal with, particularly as those other than acute care hospitals often have many more ambulatory patients with whom infection control could be more of an issue.”
The Vermont Department of Health established the MDRO (multidrug-resistant organism) Prevention Collaborative in September, 2010, with funding from the CDC. Preventing health care-associated infections has been identified by CDC as one of the six “winnable battles” in public health.
“Because patients tend to move between facilities in a community, it's especially important that staff from all healthcare facilities have an opportunity to work together and learn from each other,” said Patsy Kelso, an epidemiologist for infectious disease at the Vermont Department of Health.