title: Challenges in Hospital-Associated Infection Management: A Unit Perspective.
abstract: Maintaining a successful unit-based continuous quality improvement program for managing hospital-associated infections is a huge challenge and an overwhelming task. It requires strong organizational support and unit leadership, human and fiscal resources, time, and a dedicated and motivated nursing staff. A great deal of effort goes into implementing, monitoring, reporting, and evaluating quality improvement initiatives and can lead to significant frustration on the part of the leadership team and nursing staff when quality improvement efforts fail to produce the desired results. Each initiative presents its own unique set of challenges; however, common issues influence all initiatives. These common issues include organization and unit culture, current clinical practice guidelines being used to drive the initiatives, performance discrepancies on the part of nursing staff, availability of resources including equipment and supplies, monitoring of the data, and conflicting quality improvement priorities.
authors.affiliation: Kathleen M. Stacy is Critical Care Clinical Nurse Specialist and Clinical Associate Professor, Hahn School of Nursing and Health Science, University of San Diego, 5998 Alcala Park, San Diego, CA 92110 (kmstacy@sandiego.edu).
authors.forename: Kathleen M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Stacy
mesh_terms: D019468:Disease Management; D006739:Hospital Administration / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D007049:Iatrogenic Disease / Q000517:prevention & control*; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D058996:Quality Improvement / Q000592:standards*; D014481:United States