ON-THE-GO
RESOURCES

ON THE GO
RESOURCES

Infection control prevents or stops the spread of infections in health care settings. To help nurses and infection specialists quickly access important resources, ANA Project Firstline has curated information from the world’s most trusted and reliable sources, including the CDC, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), World Health Organization (WHO), and others.

Nurse-focused materials applicable to everyday practice include how infections spread, how to prevent the spread, and more detailed, topic-specific resources. Check back often for new content.

EXPLORE TOPICS

Resources in this section cover infection control basics, which are essential foundational steps to understand the spread of infections and ways to prevent the spread. This includes standard precautions, as well as transmission-based precautions, used for all patient care to protect nurses and prevent the spread from patient to patient.

FEATURED RESOURCES:

What Is Project Firstline?

What’s The Goal Of Infection Control?

How Do Viruses Make You Sick?

Nurses may serve as responders during disasters or infectious disease outbreaks. To effectively respond to public health emergencies and natural disasters, nurses must engage in emergency preparedness and response activities. Nurses should be prepared to maximize patient safety, decrease occupational exposures, and prevent the spread of infections in their schools, healthcare facilities, and communities during an outbreak or disaster.

FEATURED RESOURCES:

PPE For COVID-19 Patient And Crisis Standards Of Care

Empowering Nurses Disaster Preparedness Through The Seasons

Emergency Preparedness and Response

Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAIs) are infections that patients get while receiving treatment for medical or surgical conditions. HAIs occur in all settings of care, including hospitals, surgical centers, ambulatory clinics, and long-term care facilities such as nursing homes and rehabilitation facilities. Some patients are at greater risk than others-young children, the elderly, and persons with compromised immune systems are more likely to get an infection. Other risk factors are long hospital stays, the use of indwelling catheters, failure of healthcare workers to wash their hands, and overuse of antibiotics.

Understanding warning signs, preventative measures, and operational best practices are crucial to infection prevention for nurses in their healthcare setting.

FEATURED RESOURCES:

Combating Antibiotic Resistance: Infection Prevention & Control

Antibiotics Aren’t Always The Answer

Fighting a Global Threat: CDC & Partners Combat Antibiotic Resistance

School nurses and other health care personnel are integral to keeping schools and childcare programs safe from the spread of infection. Find guidance on everything from the latest infection-control techniques to proper hand hygiene, vaccination, cleaning and disinfecting, ventilation, and much more.

FEATURED RESOURCES:

Information for School Nurses and Other Health Care Personnel Working in Schools and Childcare Settings

Infection Prevention and Control in Schools

Immunization in Schools

Long-term care facilities throughout the country often lack adequate IPC knowledge and resources. Nurses can affect positive change for these facilities in their own communities with the necessary implementation tools.

FEATURED RESOURCES:

Keep COVID-19 Out!

Closely Monitor Residents for COVID-19

Use Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Correctly for Covid-19

Personal protective equipment (PPE) includes clothing, gloves, face shields, goggles, facemasks, respirators, and other equipment to protect front-line workers from injury, infection, or illness. When used properly, PPE acts as a barrier to block transmission of infectious materials from blood, body fluids, or respiratory secretions to your skin, mouth, nose, and eyes. PPE may also protect high-risk patients from exposure to potentially infectious material. Together with hand washing, use of alcohol-based hand sanitizers, and covering coughs and sneezes, PPE minimizes the spread of infection from one person to another.

FEATURED RESOURCES:

What Is Personal Protective Equipment?

PPE: The What And The Why

When Choosing PPE, How Should We Think About Risk?

Vaccines protect individuals and the public from life-threatening, preventable diseases. Healthy individuals, as well as the most vulnerable, benefit from vaccinations.

Nurses should be well-informed about safe and unsafe injection practices, including proper use and disposal, as well as understand potential risks and strategies to prevent injury or contamination.

FEATURED RESOURCES:

How Do I Safely Use a Multi-Dose Vaccine Vial? Part 1

How Do I Safely Use a Multi-Dose Vaccine Vial? Part 2

Exploring Best Practices in Injection Safety

The Project Firstline program is a national training collaborative led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in partnership with ANA and the American Academy of Pediatrics, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit entity.

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Project Firstline is a national collaborative led by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to provide infection control training and education to frontline health care workers and public health personnel. ANA is proud to partner with Project Firstline, as supported through Cooperative Agreement CDC-RFA-OT18-1802. CDC is an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The contents of this webpage do not necessarily represent the policies of CDC or HHS and should not be considered an endorsement by the Federal Government.

As a key partner in this initiative, ANA is pleased to help bring critical training opportunities and resources to better equip all nurses with the tools necessary to provide optimal patient care in a safe environment. Placement of content on this website is not an endorsement of the source nor of any particular product or service, nor should it be construed as a statement that the source, or its products or services, are superior to those of any others. ANA and/or Project Firstline may not be the primary source of the content on this website. While we make every effort to provide up-to-date relevant content, resources or information may not have been updated yet to include recent changes, new findings, recommendations, or protocols.