The Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC) is a federal committee that provides guidance on infection prevention practices in the U.S. to the federal Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in US healthcare settings. As Infection Preventionists (IPs), we are all familiar with the HICPAC guidelines including, but not limited to, the Hand Hygiene and the Environmental Infection Control Guidelines. HICPAC meets several times each year, where among other activities, new guidelines are developed and older guidelines are updated. For a more detailed overview, please see our HICPAC 101 blog post by Dr. Hudson Garrett.
Participating in HICPAC meetings puts context and rationale to the recommendations. Furthermore, as an IP, your voice can be heard or questions answered during the public comment period of the meeting. Because of the lengthy delay from meeting to posting of the minutes, we hope you will find our HICPAC meeting summary blog posts helpful to keep you informed in a timely manner.
Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Response
Dr. Denise Cardo from the CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion presented on the gaps across the healthcare delivery system, the critical needs in post-acute care (PAC), and health equity and access issues that the COVID-19 pandemic has unmasked. There is a huge need to integrate infection prevention across the entire healthcare continuum to be as robust as it is in acute care settings. For example, if you have watched the news in recent months, you have seen the challenges that nursing homes have faced during this time. In fact, 42% of all COVID-19 deaths have occurred in nursing homes.1
This pandemic has certainly highlighted the need for policies for accountability. Dr. Cardo identified three cultural changes that need to happen:
- Expand: Infection prevention needs to expand from acute care only to all healthcare and community settings;
- Contain: The mindset needs to change from one of response to one of containment;
- Eliminate: We need to move from the concept of preventing infections to eliminating them.
While we may not know exactly how this culture change will take place, it’s reassuring to know that the CDC is keenly aware of these issues and will be working on providing guidance to facilities.
Project Firstline
Dr. Mike Bell, Deputy Director for the CDC talked about the Project Firstline, a new national training collaborative for healthcare infection prevention and control for frontline healthcare and public health workers. The project was kicked off at the end of October 2020 with a key objective to effectively communicate infection prevention messaging directly to frontline workers.
The educational materials and tools provided to targeted audiences are short, convenient, and provided in easily accessible formats such as videos and podcasts. And to help make the messaging stick, the rationale behind the recommendations is strongly emphasized. Keep an eye on the Project Firstline website as the portfolio continues to expand. IPs can follow this initiative on Facebook or Twitter or sign up for email updates.
Work Group Update: Long-Term Care/Post-Acute Care
HICPAC members JoAnne Reifsnyder and Michael Lin provided an update from the Long-Term Care (LTC)/PAC Work Group. This group is working to move from a culture-based to a task-based risk for determining precautions and personal protective equipment (PPE) in LTC and PAC settings. For example, PPE decisions would be based on patient care tasks, like bathing or wound care, rather than on what is growing (or not growing) in a specimen culture.
This comes on the coat tails of the new set of precautions, Enhanced Barrier Precautions, introduced last year. With the lessons learned from the pandemic, this work group is in the process of drafting a white paper on how nursing homes should implement PPE used for resident care activities. The workgroup plans to employ human factors engineering to design their recommended interventions.
Summary
Because we understand how difficult it is for busy IPs (especially during a pandemic!) to attend HICPAC meetings, we hope that you find these meeting summaries helpful in your practice. Don’t forget to check out Project Firstline and be on the lookout for the CDCs Enhanced Barrier Precautions white paper (final title to be determined). For additional information, the HICPAC meeting minutes can be reviewed once they are posted.
References
- The New York Academy of Medicine, “Virtual Summit for Infection Prevention in Nursing Homes”, [cited 12/2/2020].
