Highlights
- •Engaging leaders across hospitals can help prevent healthcare-associated infections.
- •Strategic sharing of information can highlight both facilitators of and barriers to success in infection prevention.
- •The practice of storytelling also allows leaders to elicit emotion, provide education, and acknowledge success in infection prevention.
- •Organizations and leaders should consider the different strategic communication approaches to advance their infection prevention efforts.
ABSTRACT
Background
Engaging leaders to share information about infections and infection prevention across
their organizations is known to be important in initiatives designed to reduce healthcare-associated
infections (HAIs). Yet the topics and communication strategies used by leaders that
focus on HAI prevention are not well understood. This study aimed to identify and
describe practices around information sharing used to support HAI prevention.
Methods
We visited 18 U.S. hospitals between 2017 and 2019 and interviewed 188 administrative
and clinical leaders to ask about management practices they used to facilitate HAI
prevention. Interview transcripts were analyzed to characterize practices involving
strategic communications.
Results
Sharing information to support infection prevention involved strategic communications
around two main topics: (1) facilitators of success and best practices, and (2) barriers
to success and lessons learned. In addition, the practice of storytelling reportedly
allowed leaders to highlight impact and elicit emotion, provide education, and acknowledge
success in infection prevention by providing examples of real events.
Conclusions
Our findings provide insight about how strategic communication of information around
HAIs and HAI prevention can be used to support improvement. Organizations and leaders
should consider the different opportunities to incorporate the practice of strategic
communication, including using storytelling, to advance their infection prevention
efforts.
Key Words
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Article Info
Publication History
Published online: December 06, 2021
Footnotes
Funding: This research was supported by a grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality [Grant# R01HS024958 ]. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors and do not represent any U.S. government agency or any institutions with which the authors are affiliated. The funding source played no role in study design, data acquisition, analysis, or decision to report these data. The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality or the U.S. Federal Government.
Conflicts of interest: None to report.
Identification
Copyright
© 2021 Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
