Over the last 5 years, many healthcare services for patients that used to happen in hospitals have moved into the community. This includes nurses going to people’s homes to provide care (sometimes called “hospital at home”), or to specific places outside of hospitals where people can receive the same kinds of treatment that they would if they were in hospital (called “ambulatory care”).
When people get an infection whilst they are in hospital, we call this a “hospital-acquired” infection. In the past, we have defined these infections by how long people have been in hospital before they develop them. Generally infections happening after 2 days in hospital have been called “hospital-acquired” and infections happening before this have been called “community-acquired”. We don’t expect hospitals to be able to do anything about infections that people have bought into the hospital from the community, but we do expect hospitals to keep their rates of “hospital-acquired” infections as low as possible.
The move to giving hospital-like care at home instead of admitting patients to hospital means that these definitions probably don’t work any more – and we don’t know how many infections might be happening because of hospital-like care given at home. This study will start to try to understand how common this might be, and how the change in how care is given might need to affect how we monitor for infections that could be prevented.