Hospital-Acquired Infection

One article discussed how the validity of infection control research is determined by how well infection as an outcome can be measured (Lin &Bonten, 2012). Hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) are a type of measured outcome for patient safety intervention (Lin &Bonten, 2012). Challenges in assessing hospital-acquired infection outcomes happen due to lack of a gold standard test in diagnosing infections; it is usually based on a clinician’s judgment if there is an infection or not (Lin &Bonten, 2012). In order to maintain consistency of the study outcomes, investigators used to use definitions that were developed for surveillance purposes to measure HAIs, but recent research showed that within these definitions (or clinical determinations), there is still opportunity for subjectivity which put infection control studies at high risk to validity threats, like assessment bias ( aka ascertainment, diagnostic or observer bias) (Lin &Bonten, 2012).
Assessment bias arises when the assessment of the study subject’s outcome is affected by
There is variability in CLASBI surveillance because surveillance definitions contain both objective and subjective elements which can complicate judgment (Lin &Bonten, 2012). Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAPs) are clinically more difficult to diagnose as there are several conditions that can mimic it, and also because common definitions contain subjective elements that require an assessor’s judgment, like any change in sputum, increased respiratory secretions, increase or change in suctioning, etc (Lin &Bonten, 2012). Ways to manage assessment bias include blinding the assessor and using objective outcome measures which include mortality, length of stay, antimicrobial use and use of an automated system to perform infection surveillance (Lin &Bonten,