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The National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID) and Pfizer Inc are helping to improve the quality of data for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Nosocomial Infection Surveillance system (NNIS). Each year since 1992, NFID and Pfizer have sponsored annual training courses designed to improve the understanding of NNIS member surveillance personnel in NNIS methodology and data collection and reporting systems.
At the IDEAS training course held February 2-4, 1997 in Atlanta, GA, Roger Lovell, MD, discussed how his hospital used the NNIS system to identify problem areas potentially amenable to infection control measures. Dr. Lovell is hospital epidemiologist and medical director of the Quality Assurance and Improvement Department at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.
Dr. Lovell said that his hospital used targeted surveillance data and specific infection control strategies to reduce ventilator-associated pneumonia rates, central-line associated bloodstream infection rates, and surgical site infection rates following caesarian sections.
More than 250 hospitals in the United States participate in the NNIS system by routinely sending to CDC nosocomial infection data. Data are collected and reported using NNIS surveillance protocols and software entitled NNIS IDEAS. NNIS provides aggregated risk-adjusted infection rates that can be used by hospitals for comparison purposes as a measure of quality of care.
"NNIS data are also used by scientists and health care strategists to understand the epidemiology of nosocomial infections in the United States, including the growing problem of antimicrobial-resistant nosocomial pathogens" says T. Grace Emori, RN, MS, a senior member of CDC's NNIS staff.
The training course is an intensive 2 and a half-day experience that includes hands-on use of the IDEAS surveillance software. About 20 NNIS member surveillance personnel attend each course. Funding for their travel and lodging expenses to attend the course is provided by NFID and Pfizer Inc.
Travel grants to the 1997 Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) meeting in San Francisco, CA, September 13-16, and the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) meeting in Toronto, Ontario, September 28-October 1, are being sponsored by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID) and Zeneca Pharmaceuticals. The grants will provide free round-trip, coach class airline tickets to either San Francisco or Toronto for promising young physician investigators for whom travel funds are limited and needed.
Applicants must be authors or coauthors of papers or posters being presented at ICAAC or IDSA, and must present evidence to this effect. The distance from the applicant's residence and workplace to San Francisco or Toronto must be 450 or more air miles. Applications are open to those in infectious diseases training, or those in internal medicine, pediatrics, surgery, or obstetrics/gynecology training programs who have an interest in infectious disease research and who will present their scientific research at the meetings. A letter from the applicant's section, division, or department chairman requesting support and indicating limited funds for travel must accompany applications.
Surface travel and lodging costs are excluded. All applicants must be residents of the United States and employed by US institutions.
Completed applications must be postmarked no later than Friday, August 15, 1997 for travel to IDSA and Friday, August 29, 1997 for travel to ICAAC. Funding for this program is limited; eligible applications will be funded on a first-come, first-served basis.
To receive an application, click here or write to NFID Travel Grants, 4733 Bethesda Avenue, Suite 750, Bethesda, MD 20814-5228, (301) 656-0003, FAX (301) 907-0878, e-mail nfid@aol.com.