Changing Hospital Cultures to Reduce Hospital-Acquired Infections

This post is part of our two-week series commemorating the 10-year anniversary of the seminal IOM Report "To Err Is Human." To see all posts in the series, please click here.

This video comes from an interview with Ramanan Laxminarayan, Senior Fellow at Resources for the Future and Director of Extending the Cure, a project engaged in policy research to extend antibiotic effectiveness.

Here, Dr. Laxminarayan discusses strategies to address hospital-acquired Infections (HAIs). Certain efforts to date have been successful. For example, checklists have been associated with a significant drop in central-line bloodstream infections. The challenge is figuring out how to permanently change hospital cultures and structure incentives to reduce HAIs—because despite certain successes, there’s no conclusive evidence that overall rates of HAIs have decreased substantially in recent years.