Event ID:2863488 Event Started:2/25/2016 2:50:04 PM ET

Event ID:2863488
Event Started:2/25/2016 2:50:04 PM ET

Good afternoon, everyone and welcome to the quality innovation network learning and action network event titled CDC Best Practices To Improve Healthcare Personnel Vaccination Rates. My name is Stacy Dorriswith QSource,atom Allianceand I will serve as the moderator for today's event along with my colleagues Kristin Celesnikand CathiePritchard.

Slide two of the presentation today depicts the agenda for the time we have together this afternoon. We will first cover a few housekeeping items. Then we will hear about who atom Alliance is, and the service it provides. Then our guest speaker will be Ashley Fell who is with the Tennessee Department of Health. She will share some wonderful information and best practices related to strengthening the healthcare personnel vaccination program within your facility. This will be followed by a period where you can ask questions regarding the best practices, any challenges you face in your facility, NHSN troubleshooting issues and anything else related to our presentation today.We will also have some polling questions peppered throughout that we would appreciate your engagement in as well.

So let's run through a few housekeeping items so we are all comfortable with the features of our presentation today. We do have the phone lines muted at this time and will be only using the chat feature to communicate questions and comments from our audience today. This allows us to capture the questions and comments accurately and also to compile a Q&A fact sheet after the event that we can share with all of you. Depending on how your window is set up, the chatbox is either going to be located on the right side or the top of your screen. My colleague Kristin and Cathie are going to be our active chat feature monitors today as we move on in the presentation. If you do have a question or comment, please post in the chat and we will address them all either verbally on the phone, or via the chat. If you are not comfortable posting the question or comment for everyone to see, please you can choose my name Stacy Dorris and send it just to me and we will make sure it gets addressed. If you would like to enable full-screen, on your monitor to see the presentation, you can click on the two diagonal areas just above the presentation and to disable that mode, or to access the chat function you can scroll up to the top of your screen, to access the menu of items. Make sure you keep an eye on the chat function box during the webinar as we may have some questions for you to respond to as well. We will do a quick check of this just to make sure everyone is comfortable with the chat feature. In the checkbox, if everyone will type in the name of your pet, if you currently do not have a pet, either enter one from your childhood or maybe a friend or a family member and their pet's name. Kind of just a little exercise to make sure we are all comfortable with the chat.

Let's move on while everyone is entering their pet's name. Another thing we will have as part of today's presentation is we have three polling questions. These are really just to capture some more information about you as in regards to what state you are from an facility type you represent. We are going to move to our first polling question. Let me say that when the polling question comes up you will see some little radio buttons were you can choose your answer and then just hit the submit button that is down in the bottom right hand of the corner. Let's give the polling a try and Emily if you don't mind bringing up the first polling question. We are trying to get a feel as to which state you are from. Alabama, Indiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, or Tennessee.

[ Poll Taken ]

Our next polling question is asking which setting that you are working in, either critical access hospital, inpatient psychiatric facility, or ambulatory surgery center. Emily if you could bring that one up please.

[ Poll Taken ]

Great. Sorry I think we have a lag time on the polling question. If you could choose your applicable setting that you are calling in from. And hit submit. As those questions are wrapping up I will go ahead and move into the next slide. I am on slide seven. And slide seven really provides a snapshot of the landscape of atomAlliance. Some of you are critical access hospitals that may be familiar with atomAlliance and the organizations listed here Qsource, IQH and AQAFand others may be wondering who atomAlliance is and what we do. atomAlliance serves as the Quality Innovation Network Quality Improvement Organization, which the term Quality Improvement Organization may be familiar to some of you. We are contracted to the Centers for Medicare Medicaid Services. Our scope is statewide and specifically for this audience on today's webinar,atomAlliance is provided funding by CMS to in turn provide assistance at no cost to ambulatory surgical centers and inpatient psychiatric facilities and critical access hospitals related to healthcare quality improvement efforts. These are in tandem with these CMS quality reporting programs such as the ASC QR the IPF QR and critical access hospitals. So really globally our intent is to assist facilities in improvement efforts and activities where opportunities for improvement may exist. We’re a catalyst for sharing best practices. We foster facilities coming together to share successes and barriers. Through the quality measures we also intend to celebrate improvement and align our partners that have similar goals to improve the quality of care which is evident in our partnership with the Department of Health on today's webinar. The way we do this is through many different avenues. We conduct on-site visits with the providers, host webinars and we have newsletters and other venues that we post to our website so we are here to help you all, more information and contact information for anatom Alliance member within your state will be shared at the end of today's call.

Our objectives for the call are in line with what was discussed on the previous slide as to the goals of atom Alliance in assisting providers. We are pleased to provide you with this opportunity and with these objectives on the slide. We hope you'll take full advantage of Ashley's presence on the call today to ask her any questions related to our topics. One last polling question. Emily if you could bring up polling question number three. This question is as you have been working in implementing your healthcare personal vaccination program, what would you say are the most significant barriers to getting staff immunized? While you are answering that question I will go ahead. It is my pleasure to introduce our speaker for today, Ashley Fell. She is an MPH and epidemiologist for the Healthcare Associated Infections Program with the Tennessee Department of Health. Ashley earned her Masters of Public Health and epidemiology from Emory University and she currently serves in the capacity of an epidemiologist in the Healthcare Associated Infections Program of the Tennessee Department of Health. As Tennessee’s State HAI coordinator, she provides support and education to facilities performing surveillance of HAIs through the National Healthcare Safety Network or NHSN and supports HAI prevention initiatives through analysis and presentation of Tennessee's HAI data. We are pleased to have her. We partnered with her over a couple years now and she's a wonderful asset to our providers. Ashley I am going to turn it over to you.

Thank you for the introduction, Stacy. Good afternoon, everyone. As Stacy said I am an epidemiologist with the Tennessee Department of Health. Today I am going to review some healthcare worker flu vaccination data that we have access to and discuss some strategies we have found that have worked in Tennessee during the update of flu vaccination for healthcare workers. First, I wanted to start out by sharing some data we have on healthcare worker vaccination rates. We've included the states under the atom Alliance here. The slide shows vaccination rates by healthcare worker type in acute care hospitals for the last flu season,the 2014/2015 flu season. Overall in Tennessee the healthcare worker flu vaccination rate has increased over recent years. You can see there is some opportunity for improvement particularly in the licensed independent practice category. And then these are lagging about 20% or more. We just want to show this, I know it’s in the acute care hospital setting which is not exactly the same but we have that wealth of data to share with you all.

My next slide slide three shows healthcare worker flu vaccination rates for ambulatory surgery centers. This is from the 2014/2015 flu season. And this is the first year that ambulatory surgery centers were required to report the data to NHSN. Here's the overall vaccination rate and you can see that they are a little bit lower in the ambulatory surgery centers than they were in the acute care hospitals. We have an opportunity to investigate what strategies have worked for hospitals and hopefully implement them in the other settings to improve rates across the board.

While there are still significant progress to be gained in Tennessee hospitals, look more closely at Tennessee's most successful facilities to identify strategies that have improved their vaccination rates. The Department of Health and Human Services or HHS has set a goal of 90% vaccination for all healthcare workers by the year 2020. In the 2014/2015 flu season [ Indiscernible ] hospitals met this goal. We wanted to learn from the facilities to identify what strategies are working and they have been so successful of reaching the goal of 90% vaccination.

For the following slide, number five, what strategies have been found to increase healthcare worker immunization. Including leadership support, mandatory immunization policies, staff immunization strategies like making vaccinations free, accessible, and easy to get. Utilizing vaccine nation delivery methods like a mobile vaccination card. Using key messages like protect yourself and your patients to encourage vaccination communicating with staff and providing educational materials, using engaging and interactive immunization campaigns at your facility and identifying staff volunteers to be flu champions and encourage their peers to be vaccinated. When you look at Tennessee's data in the hospitals, we found a strong association between leadership support and mandatory immunization policies which increased rates of healthcare worker flu vaccination in Tennessee. To explore that a bit further, we use data that's reported to NHSN so each year in addition to reporting healthcare worker flu vaccination summary data, facilities are best to complete a short survey and a screenshot of that survey showed on the slide. There are six questions they ask about the facility’s annual flu vaccination program. We took a closer look at the information from that survey to identify the strategies that were associated with the most successful facilities.

One of these successful strategies that we identified was the visible vaccination of key personnel and their leadership. The hospitals that utilize the visible vaccination were over twice as likely to meet the goal of 90% vaccination were compared to facilities that did not use it. We identified that as a good strategy to help encourage your healthcare workers to get vaccinated. Another policy we found that was associated with the use of successful facilities was not surprising but the facilities that had mandatory vaccination requirements, also increased their healthcare worker vaccination. Hospitals are required flu vaccination of the requirement of credentialing of the facility were twice as likely to meet their goal. And similarly, hospitals that required vaccination as a condition of employment, were over two and half times more likely to meet the 90% goal when compared to other facilities. This should not surprise you, when you are incentivizing your staff to get vaccinated you will see an increase in your vaccination rate.

In order to understand the impact a little better, we also looked at the increase in a facilities vaccination rate when they implemented a new mandatory vaccination policy. For the year it was implemented. For the 2014-2015 flu season, 16 Tennessee hospitals implemented a new mandatory vaccination policy require their employees to be vaccinated and on average, these facilities reported increase of 21 and 1/2 percentage points in their healthcare worker vaccination rate compared to other Tennessee facilities who on average had an increase of 5.5% in their vaccination rate. Not only are these facilitie more likely to meet the goal of 90% vaccination, the year they implemented a policy, they saw a 20% increase in the rate. For some facilities they were going from 60% vaccination, to 70% vaccination up to 80% or 90% with the mandatory vaccination policy. I would encourage you to evaluate that at your facility. Implementing a mandatory policy can significantly drive up your immunization rate especially if you are struggling with getting your healthcare workers vaccinated.

There are other practices that increase vaccination rates. While the associations weren't as strong in these cases, successful facilities were more likely to require their healthcare workers who didn't receive flu vaccination to wear a mask during the flu season when they are in patient care areas. And successful facilities tended to offer vaccination for free at convenient locations, at the facilities, and they included all shifts in their vaccination campaigns. Some facilities reported bringing the flu vaccine to departmental meetings and other times when their healthcare workers would be gathering together. A few other things we found successful facilities were doing. Communication with the staff was really important. There are many ways to use existing methods of communication within your facility email and newsletters that you already have going for example. You can use these to promote flu vaccination and provide that additional education. There's also a lot of free material available from websites like CDC and I included a link on the slide. There are also many other sources for materials like this. The little blue “vaccinated against the flu I care about you” that’s a sticker you can download from the CDC website. I thought that was neat. They make stickers like that for patients as well.

I really like the handout that Stacy shared prior to the webinar providing information about why flu vaccination is so important is a really good way to encourage your staff to get vaccinated and also inform them about the difference they are making and if they are truly protecting their patients when they choose to be immunized against seasonal flu.

I also just wanted to bring to your attention some good national campaigns that promote flu vaccination. I really like this one CDC social media campaign. Vaccinate with me and there's a link to that information on the site. Participating in campaigns like this can be a good way to connect with your healthcare workers and increase the reach into the community as well.

I wanted to end today with a couple reminders and resources for reporting your healthcare worker data, healthcare worker flu vaccination data to NHSN. And Stacy had on the slide earlier that vaccination deadline is May 15, 2016. You need to make sure your data are complete and entered into NHSN prior to that date. Just a note for the Tennessee facilities listening today, if you are an ambulatory surgery center or inpatient psych facility, please make sure you join the TDH group within NHSN and feel free to email us. I've included the address in the slide if you have any questions or want to chat with your facility to see if your facility is enrolled properly.

Finally, here are resources, and I am sure Stacy has shared these as well. If you have any additional questions that we don't get a chance to answer today, Tennessee facilities are welcome to get in touch with us at TDH with the email address on the site. You can reach out to NHSN through the website or the helpdesk email address. I've included that on the slides will. They also have some great recently asked question documents on their website so I would recommend checking that out as well. Thank you everyone for your time and attention. I would be happy to take any questions to the checkbox at this time.

Thanks, Ashley. This is Kristin. We do have a couple questions that have been coming in through chat. Certainly I encourage others if you do have questions keep submitting them and we will get them asked. Ashley first someone was wondering:Do the mandatory vaccination policies take into account personnel issues like allergies to the vaccine?

Yes. Most of the policies, and it would be dependent on your facility, but if a provider had a medical contraindication for taking the vaccine that would be taken into account. However if the healthcare worker is unable to receive the vaccine for one of those reasons, many facilities have the requirement to wear a mask in patient care areas during the flu season.