Each year on 5 May, the annual “SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands” global campaign is part of a major global effort led by the World Health Organization (WHO) to support healthcare workers in their efforts to improve hand hygiene in healthcare settings.
This document is intended for hospital staff that use HelicsWin.Net to collect or administer data collected during the ECDC Point Prevalence Survey (PPS) of healthcare-associated infections (HAI) and antimicrobial use (AMU) in acute care hospitals.
Antimicrobial resistance represent a serious threat to public health and patient safety and is a worldwide problem. Each year, in the European Union (EU) at least 25 000 patients die of infections with multidrug-resistant bacteria.
ECDC publishes today the results of its first point prevalence survey (PPS) on healthcare-associated infections and antimicrobial use in European hospitals. Based on findings from this survey, ECDC estimates that on any given day, one in 18 patients in European hospitals has at least one healthcare-associated infection. The report also presents data on the most commonly reported infections, which microorganisms are most commonly reported as causing them, how often antimicrobial drugs are being used to treat these infections and data on infection control structure and processes in the hospitals. More than 1 000 hospitals in 30 European countries participated in this first Europe-wide PPS.
WHO “SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands” is an annual campaign that makes part of major global effort to support healthcare workers to improve hand hygiene practices in hospitals and other healthcare facilities, and thus support the prevention of healthcare-associated infections.
This document is published with the intent of proposing a comprehensive list of core competencies that should be adopted by infection control and hospital hygiene professionals across Europe.
The protocol provides a standardised methodology to Member States and hospitals in response to article II.8.c of Council Recommendation 2009/C 151/01 of 9 June 2009 on patient safety, including the prevention and control of healthcare-associated infections. It also integrates the main variables of the ESAC hospital PPS protocol, thereby providing support to Council Recommendation 2002/77/EC of 15 November 2001 on the prudent use of antimicrobial agents in human medicine.
HELICSwin.Net is a software application developed for the manual entry of data collected during the ECDC point prevalence survey (PPS) of healthcare-associated infections (HAI) and antimicrobial use (AU) in acute care hospitals.
Following an invitation from Greek authorities, ECDC Director Marc Sprenger and experts from the ECDC Programmes for Sexually Transmitted Infections including HIV and blood-borne infections and Antimicrobial Resistance and Healthcare-associated Infections will visit Greece on 29 and 30 November 2012.
The sixth European Scientific Conference on Applied Infectious Disease Epidemiology (ESCAIDE) opened today at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC).