Surveillance of health care-associated infections at national and facility levels

Overview

In the context of strengthening national and facility-level HAI surveillance as a core component of infection prevention and control (IPC) programmes, WHO is publishing a new practical handbook on HAI surveillance, including new simplified and validated case definitions. The main purpose of this handbook is to provide comprehensive guidance on the objectives, key concepts, principles, methods, and best practices of HAI surveillance, in order to help policymakers and IPC and surveillance professionals to design and implement effective surveillance systems to measure the burden of HAI and take action for its prevention. The handbook also includes new definitions that were developed and validated by WHO with consensus by international experts, with the intent that they could be more suitable for use in low-resource settings. These efforts are aimed at enabling more countries to design and implement HAIs surveillance systems programmes, fostering more consistent data collection across diverse healthcare settings, and streamlining the identification of HAIs for global, regional, and national benchmarking.