STRIVE Infection Control Training

Centers for Disease Control (CDC)

The CDC/STRIVE curriculum was developed by national infection prevention experts led by the Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET) for CDC. Courses address both the technical and foundational elements of healthcare-associated infection (HAI) prevention. Courses can be taken in any order. Each course has 1 or more modules. Individual modules can be used for; new employee training, annual infection prevention training, and/or periodic training.

Toolkit To Improve Safety for Mechanically Ventilated Patients

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)

The Toolkit To Improve Safety for Mechanically Ventilated Patients helps hospitals make care safer for mechanically ventilated patients in intensive care units (ICUs).  ICU staff can use the toolkit to apply the proven principles and methods of AHRQ’s Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP) to reduce complications for patients on ventilators. Such complications include ventilator-associated pneumonia, which affects as many as 20 percent of patients who are on a ventilator for more than 48 hours. The toolkit includes resources used by hospitals that participated in the AHRQ Safety Program for Mechanically Ventilated Patients project.

CUSP Guide for Reducing Ventilator Associated Events in Mechanically Ventilated Patients

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)

You can redesign your care system through technical and adaptive work to improve patient safety and eliminate preventable harm. Technical work focuses on procedural aspects of care that can be explicitly defined, such as the evidence to support a specific intervention or the definition for a ventilator-associated event (VAE). Adaptive work targets the attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors of the people who deliver care. The five-step CUSP process brings adaptive work into the change process and helps your team improve your unit’s safety culture. By integrating CUSP with technical interventions, your team can achieve real and sustainable improvements in safety.

Improving the Measurement of Surgical Site Infection Risk Stratification/Outcome Detection

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)

The purpose of this project was to explore opportunities for enhancing the detection and surveillance of inpatient-acquired surgical site infections (SSIs) for four target procedures—herniorrhaphy, coronary artery bypass graft (CABG), and hip and knee arthroplasty (including primary total arthroplasty, primary hemiarthroplasty, and revision procedures). Four delivery systems came together in order to provide the most representative results and generalizable tools. Collaborating delivery systems include Denver Health (a safety-net hospital located in Denver, CO), Intermountain Healthcare (a large, nonprofit, integrated delivery system based in Salt Lake City, UT), and the Salt Lake City Veterans Affairs Medical Center (a VAMC hospital located in Salt Lake City); representativeness was further extended by including the Vail Valley Medical Center (Vail, CO), a Denver Health partner. A major focus of the project was to test the usefulness of computer algorithms that could alert infection control specialists to patients likely to have surgical site infections on the basis of retrospective analysis of electronic medical records, laboratory test results, and patient demographics.

Toolkit To Promote Safe Surgery

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)

The Toolkit To Promote Safe Surgery helps perioperative and surgical units in hospitals identify opportunities to improve care and safety practices and implement evidence-based interventions to prevent surgical site infections. The toolkit has evidence-based, practical resources that reflect the real-world experiences of the frontline clinicians and subject matter experts who participated in the AHRQ Safety Program for Surgery, a national implementation project in which approximately 200 hospitals participated and successfully reduced surgical site infections. It builds on AHRQ’s Comprehensive Unit-based Safety Program (CUSP) and the core CUSP toolkit by providing specific tools focused on the surgical setting to help hospitals reduce surgical site infections and other complications. This toolkit focuses on surgery in hospitals

Providing Language Services to Diverse Populations: Lessons from the Field

Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Office of Minority Health (OMH)

Across the country, health care organizations are using innovative approaches to provide language assistance services to individuals with limited English proficiency. This resource discusses a number of approaches used by these organizations to provide language assistance services to persons with limited English proficiency based on the findings of case studies conducted with a variety of health care organizations.

Guide to Developing a Language Access Plan

Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Office of Minority Health (OMH)

Effective communication is critical to ensuring understanding, empowering patients, and providing high quality care. A language access plan can help ensure that an organization provides high quality and appropriate language services. This guide identifies ways that providers can assess their programs and develop language access plans to ensure persons with limited English proficiency have meaningful access to their programs.

A Practical Guide to Implementing the National CLAS Standards: For Racial, Ethnic and Linguistic Minorities, People with Disabilities and Sexual and Gender Minorities

Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Office of Minority Health (OMH)

The purpose of this toolkit is to enable organizations to implement the National CLAS Standards and improve health equity. It is organized according to the enhanced National CLAS Standards, and provides practical tools and examples of CLAS, in addition to efforts to implement the National CLAS Standards that can be adapted for use by health care organizations. It is intended for organizations that have already decided to pursue CLAS, to improve equity and eliminate health care disparities.