Infection control surveillance in a rehabilitation hospital.

Infection control surveillance in a rehabitation setting is essential to quality assurance because of the high number of infection risk factors found in this patient population. These factors include longer length of stay, high incidence of urinary tract instrumentation, and high incidence of skin lesions, including decubital and stump wounds. A surveillance process is described which offers timely access to each infected patient's diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up, and results in simplified hospital-wide antibiotic monitoring. Quality assurance problems identified through this surveillance plan involved specimen collecting and reporting errors, nursing-procedure inadequacies, and organism misidentification. These and other examples illustrate the distinctive role an infection control program can play in quality monitoring and problem solving in a rehabilitation hospital.