ECDC PPS - inclusion/exclusion criteria

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:
  • Include all wards in acute-care facilities, including, for example, chronic care and long-term care wards, acute psychiatric wards and neonatal ICUs.
  • Excluded: accident & emergency department (except for wards attached to A&E departments where patients are monitored for more than 24 hours).
  • 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).

FEM PAGE CONTRIBUTORS 2007

Contributors

Vladimir Prikazsky

Carl Suetens