A 2011 study found that out of 52,443 UK NHS hospital patients surveyed, a total of 3,360 were diagnosed with an active healthcare-associated infection (HAI), while 135 patients had more than one infection.1 To make matters worse, the threat of antimicrobial resistance is making these infections increasingly difficult to treat. This is why prevention is becoming a top priority for hospitals around the world.
Today, infection preventionists have two approaches at their disposal: vertical and horizontal. A vertical strategy focuses on preventing or controlling the outbreak of a single profile pathogen and provides great data. However, it is time-consuming, may allow some pathogens to go unnoticed and forces facilities to implement, manage and report the effectiveness of multiple strategies to have a meaningful impact on the HAI rate of the system.
Conversely, a horizontal strategy uses long-term techniques to comprehensively address bioburden throughout the patient environment. While horizontal approaches are often less expensive to initiate, attaining the same level of correlated data that vertical strategies provide can be a challenge.
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