The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) recently released their “Healthcare-Associated Infection (HAI) Surveillance and Prevention Plan” describing all of the HAI activities currently underway and other activities that will be considered if additional funding becomes available.
There have been shifts in healthcare delivery from acute care settings to ambulatory and long- term care settings. As a result, infection control and oversight is lacking in non-hospital settings which has resulted in outbreaks.
The MDHHS 2015-2017 plan is to have long-term care and long-term acute care facilities share their HAI data with the state’s “Surveillance of Healthcare-Associated & Resistant Pathogens” (SHARP). The goal is for SHARP to collect and analyze data from participating hospitals with the goal to increase the number of participating hospitals to ten percent by 2017.
An ongoing plan is to develop standard reporting criteria to include numbers, size, and type of HAI outbreaks with the data going to state health departments and the CDC. Since June 2014, MDHHS has been establishing the mechanisms so that information can be exchanged about outbreaks or breaches among state and local governmental partners.
Very importantly, the state is improving electronic reporting and information technology for healthcare facilities to use to help in reporting HAIs, so that the information is more comprehensive and timely.
Future goals are to improve the surveillance and detection of HAIs in nonhospital settings by the fall of 2016. By December 2017, the hope is to recruit greater participation in the voluntary National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) by ten percent and at the same time, recruit Long Term Acute Care (LIAC) hospitals to share data.
The state is in the process of creating an inventory of all healthcare settings in the state. The list must include at least one infection control point of contact at each facility. The inventory must also identify current regulatory and licensing oversight authorities for each healthcare facility and explore ways to expand oversight.
www.michigan.gov/documents/mdhhs/Revised_Michigan_2015_HAI_Plan_11_02_15_505300_7.pdf has details on “Michigan’s Healthcare-Associated Infection Surveillance and Prevention Plan.”