Exploration and Development of Infection Control Model of Long-Term Care Facilities.

This research project aim to explore the issues of infectious control system among long-term care facilities, including infectious surveillance system, administrative management, environmental facilities, and to find out the main problems during the outbreaks and further establish a standard protocol about infectious control for these institutions. Long-term care facilities and their residents will be recruited as research samples, and the medical charts will be the main data resources. This project will be held for 2 years. We will create databases, collect data, and visit the long-term care facilities regarding to infectious control system in the first year. The second year we will keep gathering data and start to analyze them. Furthermore, we are going to involve the practical operation during infectious outbreak, conduct discussion meetings with infectious expertises, and summarize the common barriers during infectious control procedures of those facilities. Facilities will be evaluated after improving problems of infectious control. This project will be proceeded with 4 different objectives. The main methods of each objectives are as below: 1. Objective1: To create infectious surveillance indicators for residents in long-term care facilities. We will propose infectious surveillance indicators and establish evidenced-based data for reference. Risk factors of infection occurrence among residents will be explored. 2. Objective2: To explore health care-associated infection occurrences for residents in long-term care facilities. We will count the times which residents went out for medical care and occurred health care-associated infection from hospitals for an important indicator. In addition, the characteristics of hospitals will be regarded as risk factors of health care-associated infection occurrences. 3. Objective3: To observe the practice of infectious control system in long-term care facilities. We will check the infectious control related equipment and required items, and involve the practice of infectious control system if there were outbreaks. 4. Objective4: To discover the difficulties of practical implementation and propose the possible improvement suggestion. We expect to provide some specific suggestions for each facility in order to increase the care quality and evaluate infection occurrences after intervention.