Promoting Health Departments’ Accomplishments and Highlighting the Impact of Program Funding

Background:

Preventing healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) and slowing the spread of antimicrobial resistance (AR) are top priorities for the CDC. Among several domestic initiatives, CDC provides a network of health departments with funding, technical expertise, and resources through its HAI/AR Program. Health departments play a crucial role in supporting their jurisdictions’ healthcare systems and improving patient safety. Promoting health departments’ accomplishments and highlighting the impact of program funding, in addition to conveying common challenges or barriers to program successes, are key responsibilities of CDC’s HAI/AR Program communications staff.

Program background:

CDC’s HAI/AR Program awards funding through the Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity Cooperative Agreement (ELC) to all 50 state, five local, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, U.S Virgin Islands, and six U.S.-affiliated Pacific Island health departments. These health departments conduct activities in HAI/AR response and prevention, antibiotic stewardship, the Antimicrobial Resistance Laboratory Network, infection prevention and control education and training, the National Healthcare Safety Network, and strike team support for nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. The Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion’s (DHQP’s) staffing structure aligns with each of the six areas, and though there are communicators serving each of them, DHQP hired a communications specialist in 2022 who coordinates overall HAI/AR Program messaging, henceforth referred to as the HAI/AR Program communicator.

Evaluation Methods and Results:

DHQP staff in each of the six programmatic areas are kept abreast of health departments’ major accomplishments and barriers. In turn, they convey pertinent information to the HAI/AR Program communicator during topic-specific workgroups. The HAI/AR Program communicator collects additional successes and challenges from four sources: annual continuing applications, biannual performance measures, quarterly workplan and milestone reports, and as-needed direct requests. Together, these efforts yield findings from which products and messaging can be created.

The HAI/AR Program communicator packages information in various formats, such as fact sheets, web content, program progress reports, and more. Intended audiences for these materials include DHQP and CDC leadership, external public health partners like ASTHO, NACCHO, and CSTE, and policymakers. Most recently, the HAI/AR Program communicator produced a series of fact sheets detailing the impact of American Rescue Plan Act funding on health departments’ HAI/AR prevention and control efforts and, ultimately, increased patient safety.

Conclusions:

Health department success stories, common challenges, and performance measures informed fact sheet content, yielding a compelling and data-informed product for use during DHQP meetings with key public health partner and policymaker audiences in spring 2023.

The HAI/AR Program communicator ensures products and messaging reflect progress of the entire HAI/AR Program, as opposed to one of six programmatic areas, improving the Program’s ability to share compelling information using one voice.

Implications for research and/or practice:

Similarly large programs may benefit from embedding a communicator to assist with strategic message coordination. In addition, programs may benefit from ensuring communicators coordinate across programs and teams (e.g., program leads, evaluation units, etc.), which increases the number of sources to leverage for content creation.