APIC Research Foundation to Conduct National Inpatient Healthcare Facility Survey on C. diff

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Beginning May 1 and running through May 23, the APIC Research Foundation announces that it will fund and conduct a prevalence survey on Clostridium difficile in order to determine changes for both healthcare-associated and community-onset C. difficile in healthcare facilities. The study represents the foundation's first national prevalence survey of its kind.

Infection rates and severity of disease associated with this virulent pathogen C. difficile have been rapidly emerging and increasingly been reported from individual healthcare facilities over the last few years. This one-day point-prevalence study will be similar to our efforts in the 2006 methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) Prevalence Study, which had a response from 24 percent of U.S. healthcare facilities. The results of the survey had more than 250 million media impressions when infection/colonization rate in inpatients at U.S. healthcare facilities were discovered to be 46 per 1,000 patients. In APIC's Pace of Progress poll administered six months after the 2006 national MRSA survey, the organization learned that 59 percent of the 2,100 members who responded were either adopting, or had already adopted interventions to prevent MRSA infection/colonization. 

APIC states that participation in this survey is crucial toward national advocacy for well-integrated and resourced infection prevention programs to prevent these serious infections, and that data collected from the survey will benefit infection prevention and control professionals, local, state and federal agencies, regulators, payors and patients..    

Source: APIC