Working group: Universitarty Training

Care-associated infections cause significant morbidity and mortality in patients and place a financial burden on health systems. Preventing the risks of the infections to patients, health care professionals and visitors is essential to ensure safe quality care and reduce antimicrobial resistance.

The implementation of education and training pathways to develop competences in infection prevention and control is important because events due to unsafe treatment are very frequent: they are probably one of the top 10 causes of death and disability in the world.

In order to strengthen the training of health professionals as a key lever for infection control, it is necessary to:
- promote the basic and post-basic training of operators;
- define the specialist skills needed for infection control staff and antimicrobial stewardship programs;
- promote training on these subjects in the various areas of basic training.

After more than 10 years from the drafting of competency profile of the nurse specialist in infectious risk and the core curriculum for the training of this figure, ANIPIO needs to initiate a process of comparison with referents of basic and advanced university nursing education. The aim is to develop a set of expected core competencies and essential content to guide the design of the three-year degree programs on infectious risk management and for the design of advanced post-basic training pathways (in particular Master’s Degree Level I and, in the future, Master’s Degree pathways).

This working group is the result of the collaboration of ANIPIO with nurses specialized in infectious risk management and expert trainers and teachers of the three-year degree in Nursing and post-basic courses of the University of Verona, Parma, Roma Tor Vergata and Udine.