To address this serious threat to public health, National Quality Partners™ (NQP) convened an Action Team of more than 25 experts and stakeholders from the public and private sectors—including patient advocates, infectious disease physicians and pharmacists, and acute-care providers—and was co-chaired by Arjun Srinivasan, MD (CAPT, USPHS), Associate Director for Healthcare-Associated Infection Prevention Programs, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Ed Septimus, MD, Medical Director, Infection Prevention and Epidemiology, HCA. Together, the Action Team developed the NQP Playbook™: Antibiotic Stewardship in Acute Care, which, within only a few months of its launch, became an essential resource to help acute-care hospitals in the United States implement strategies to promote the appropriate and safe use of antibiotics.
The NQP Playbook™ is the first resource of its kind to provide a comprehensive framework to help acute-care hospitals implement CDC’s Core Elements of Antibiotic Stewardship. At the same time, it is intentionally flexible so that antibiotic stewardship programs in acute-care hospitals can meet the needs of their community and address stewardship barriers that are specific to their organization.
Building off of the Action Team’s success, NQP is working to adapt the Playbook for long-term care settings. Using the CDC’s Core Elements of Antibiotic Stewardship for Nursing Homes as a guiding framework, this Playbook will highlight practical and actionable solutions that address the unique needs of long-term care facilities seeking to implement an antibiotic stewardship program. Such programs are needed to combat the increasing prevalence of drug-resistant organisms in long-term care facilities and improve residents’ health outcomes. This adaptation is also timely as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid’s conditions of participation will require long-term care facilities and nursing homes to demonstrate the implementation of an antibiotic stewardship program by November 2018. The finalized Playbook will be published in the summer of 2018. If you have any questions, please contact Rachel Roiland at rroiland@qualityforum.org.
The NQP Playbook™: Antibiotic Stewardship in Acute Care was supported by an educational grant from Merck & Co., Inc., with additional support from Vizient, Inc., Astellas Pharma US, Inc., Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), Premier, Inc., and HCA.
The NQP Playbook™: Antibiotic Stewardship for Long-Term Care Facilities is being developed in partnership with Momentum Health Strategies and with support from bioMérieux, HCA Healthcare, and Premier, Inc.
Contact National Quality Partners for information about how to support the development of a Playbook for ambulatory healthcare settings.