The “Point prevalence survey of healthcare associated infections and antimicrobial use in European acute care hospitals” protocol has the following inclusion/exclusion criteria:
- hospitals:
- all acute care hospitals are eligible for inclusion without size limits. An acute care hospital is defined according to national definitions.
- wards:
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- The ward specialty is always recorded so that results can be stratified and standardised.
- patients:
- all patients admitted to the ward before or at 8 a.m. and not discharged from the ward at the time of the survey are included; in practice, this means that patients transferred in/out after 8 a.m. from/to another ward should not be included (see Figure 1). Neonates on maternity and paediatric wards if born before/at 8 a.m. are include. Long-term care patients in acute care wards are included unless more than 20% of the patients in the acute care ward are long-term care patients.
- exclude day cases:
- patients undergoing same day treatment or surgery;
- patients seen at outpatient department;
- patients in the emergency room;
- dialysis patients (outpatients).
Figure 1 Examples of included and excluded patients in the point prevalence survey.
Legend. W1: ward 1, W2: ward 2
Further specifications for inclusion/exclusion criteria:
- patients who are temporarily off from the ward for diagnostic investigations/procedures must be included; if patient does not return to the ward before the end of the PPS day and information about patient is not available at 8 a.m., it will be necessary to revisit ward;
- patients who are on the patient administration system but at home for a number of hours must be included.
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Link to European IC/HH Core Competencies
Area 3. Surveillance and investigation of healthcare associated infection (HAI)
References
http://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications/Publications/0512-TED-PPS-HAI-antimicrobial-use-protocol.pdf
