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Educational Workshops 2005 - Making a difference to MRSA and other HAIs

Changing professional practice is challenging and can rarely be achieved by simple education alone. The reason that research evidence does not automatically change practice is that most of it only tells people why change is required, not how to achieve change.

New guidelines about MRSA have just been issued by a BSAC/HIS Working Party and provide much needed guidance about what needs to be done. However, change will not occur unless we learn the lessons from two systematic reviews about interventions to improve infection control and antibiotic prescribing in hospitals. Both have positive messages, isolation interventions can reduce the incidence of MRSA and interventions on prescribing can improve clinical outcome by targeting antibiotics to patients who need them. However, the bad news is that the majority of published studies use flawed methods for evaluating change, over 75% of published papers did not achieve the minimum standards for inclusion in the reviews. This is a terrible waste of effort and poor evaluation may have obscured important information about other interventions that worked.

The aim of these workshops was to ensure dissemination throughout the UK of this crucial new evidence about what needs to be done and how to evaluate change.

Available Resources
Programme
Session 1 - Basis of Bias(To view authors notes you will need to save this file to your desktop)
Session 2 - MRSA: a case in point; session plan
Session 3 - Calculating antimicrobial consumption
Session 4 - How to design a decent study(To view authors notes you will need to save this file to your desktop)
Workgroup 1 - MRSA
Workgroup 2 - Clostridium difficile
Ribner Harbath summaries from review
Workshop Summary Review
Workshop Feedback

• Document type:Presentation