Following on from my previous blog about national surveillance, you asked why we should have a national HAI surveillance program when you believe the surveillance you do is perfectly adequate for your (hospitals) needs.

I have listed below (in no particular order) some of the reasons why I think we should.

1. National surveillance and benchmarking instils consumers with confidence that hospitals are measuring safety and quality in a uniform manner.
2. Somewhere there is a hospital with the highest infection rate in Australia and they don’t know about it and they might not realise they can improve
3. Somewhere there is a hospital with the lowest infection rate in Australia and they can serve as a model for infection prevention
4. Safety and quality of healthcare should not be dependent on location, size or any other demographic of the hospital
5. National HAI data will inform national infection prevention policy
6. National HAI data will inform national infection prevention initiatives and their effectiveness
7. National HAI data will inform national infection prevention research priorities
8. In a recent discrete choice experiment about preferences for a national surveillance program, over 95% of key stakeholders believed that national surveillance would be beneficial to their infection prevention program (unpublished)
9. Evidence based national HAI surveillance will make better use of precious resources currently being used on poor surveillance practices
10. National HAI surveillance programs reduce the incidence of HAI by benchmarking, identifying problem areas and implementing best practice.

What do you think? Agree, disagree, have other suggestions?

Phil Russo