In recent years, there has been a significant shift of health care delivery to nonacute care settings. However, research on staffing and resources dedicated to infection prevention and control (IPC) in these settings is lacking.
The data for this analysis come from the 2015 APIC MegaSurvey. Descriptive statistics were computed to describe infection preventionists (IPs) employed in nonacute care settings. Bivariate analyses were conducted to examine differences in facility and demographic characteristics by type of nonacute care setting.
In total, 861 IPs represented ambulatory surgical centers (33%), long-term care facilities (23%), long-term acute care facilities (20%), inpatient behavioral or mental health care (12%), clinic or outpatient services (10%), and home health care (3%). Few (15%) were Certified in Infection Control. Most (58%) reported that less than half of their job was officially dedicated to IPC. On average, respondents reported spending the largest proportion of their time on surveillance and epidemiologic investigation (19%). IPs lacked support for secretarial functions (23%), data management (14%), and electronic medical records (32%). IPC activities, staffing, and resources differed significantly by type of nonacute care facility.
This study indicates that resources directed to IPC in nonacute care settings may be lacking and identifies important areas for IPC education and program improvement. Research is needed to further examine staffing and IPC resources in these settings, which represent unique challenges to infection prevention and control.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 6. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 01 September 2020.
All research outputs
#7,317,061
of 33,779,198 outputs
Outputs from American Journal of Infection Control
#1,892
of 5,099 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#93,690
of 362,196 outputs
Outputs of similar age from American Journal of Infection Control
#41
of 81 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 33,779,198 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 73rd percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 5,099 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 20.6. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 57% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 362,196 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 72% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 81 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 46th percentile – i.e., 46% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
