CDC spending more than $2 billion on infection control and prevention efforts

Photo: Rubberball/Nicole Hill/Getty Images

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has earmarked $2.1 billion from American Rescue Plan funding to improve infection control and prevention across the country – the largest federal investment of its kind to date, the agency said.

The funding is meant to equip state, local and territorial public health departments and other partner organizations with the resources needed to better fight infections in healthcare facilities, including COVID-19 and other known and emerging infectious diseases.

In keeping with ongoing efforts by the Biden Administration, the funding commitment is also intended to address healthcare-related inequities.

It will, the CDC said, help healthcare personnel to prevent infections more effectively in healthcare settings, support rapid response to detect and contain infectious organisms, enhance laboratory capacity and engage in innovation targeted at combating infectious disease threats.

Improvements in infection prevention are expected to span the healthcare continuum, including an estimated 6,000 hospitals, 15,400 nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, 7,900 dialysis clinics and 4,700 ambulatory surgery centers. It will also extend to other outpatient settings.

WHAT'S THE IMPACT?

The hope is that the investments will help address the rise of healthcare-associated infections, which increased as U.S. hospitals were inundated by COVID-19 – reversing some of the progress seen prior to the pandemic.

Over the next three years, the CDC will issue $1.25 billion of the total to 64 state, local and territorial health departments to support this work. Initial awards totaling $885 million will be made in October to these jurisdictional health departments. The CDC will use the majority of this initial funding, $500 million, in October, to support a new force in the fight against COVID-19 to protect those disproportionately affected: state-based nursing-home and long-term-care strike teams.

The funding from CDC, in partnership with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, will allow state and other jurisdictional health departments to staff, train and deploy these strike teams to assist skilled nursing facilities, nursing homes and other long-term care facilities with known or suspected COVID-19 outbreaks. 

The strike teams will allow jurisdictions to provide surge capacity to facilities for clinical services, address staffing shortages at facilities, and strengthen infection prevention and control (IPC) activities to prevent, detect and contain outbreaks, including activities to support for COVID-19 vaccine boosters.

The remaining $385 million to be awarded in October will go to state, local and territorial health departments to strengthen a number of critical areas, including laboratory capacity. The funds will increase state and regional laboratory capacity to conduct surveillance for emerging pathogens to better identify patients infected with or carrying infectious disease threats, such as antibiotic-resistant germs.

Funds will also be set aside for Project Firstline, which aims to meet the various education needs of the healthcare workforce, ensuring they have adequate knowledge, training, and education, and for the National Healthcare Safety Network, which will determine where and when infections occur in healthcare settings and target IPC interventions.

Additional funds will support state data analyses of antibiotic use and will implement programs to improve antibiotic-prescribing across communities, including ones addressing health disparities related to antibiotic use.

THE LARGER TREND

A prior CDC analysis from earlier this month showed the coronavirus pandemic had a direct increase on the number of healthcare-acquired infections in hospitals nationwide.

Increases were attributed to factors related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including more and sicker patients requiring more frequent and longer use of catheters and ventilators, as well as staffing and supply challenges, the report said.

With dramatic increases in the frequency and duration of ventilator use, rates of ventilator-associated infections increased by 45% in the fourth quarter of 2020, compared to 2019. The analysis found sharp increases in standardized infection rates, indicating that the increases were not simply a reflection of more devices being used.

Other recent studies have shown substantial increases in healthcare-associated infections during the pandemic in central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs), catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs), ventilator-associated events (VAEs), and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteremia.

Twitter: @JELagasse
Email the writer: jeff.lagasse@himssmedia.com