CME Credits: 2

Type: Oral

Summary: The symposium intends to highlight areas where Europe has made significant progress during the past decade. Europe is patchwork of countries with various healthcare systems, economies, and cultures that strongly influence the level of monitoring and control of HAIs and of multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs). Since the beginning of the 1990s, there have been efforts to coordinate national initiatives and standardize European surveillance of HAIs. This surveillance is now transferred at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), which supports existing national networks, promotes data quality improvement, and supports implementation of new networks in European countries. Additionally, several European projects are now addressing the growing public health threat of HAIs and MDROs in LTC. Finally, there are large differences among European countries with regard to their prevalence of MDROs. Cross-border transfer of patients with MDROs occurs regularly between European countries and may have an impact on patient safety in the admitting hospitals and facilities. Questions remain about how these organisms could be better detected and how patient transfer between countries should be handled.