Background

In January 2014, the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI), in conjunction with key healthcare stakeholders, formed the National Patient Safety Consortium to create an Integrated Patient Safety Action Plan. The action plan identified four priority areas: safe surgical care, medication safety, home care safety, and infection prevention and control.

A strategy to advance a National Infection Prevention and Control (IPAC) action plan was the focus of a November, 2014 IPAC Summit, co-hosted by the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI) and the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC). A major theme arising from the summit was culture and behaviour change. This theme stemmed from summit participants' acknowledgement that healthcare providers often "know" what to do, but, for whatever reason, they don't do what they are supposed to do. To achieve action within this theme, participants voiced the need to move away from traditional approaches of education and knowledge translation and focus more on behavioural change. As such, the action plan identified the goal of improving IPAC through a national campaign, focusing on raising awareness and promoting behaviour change. The first step towards achieving this goal was to conduct an environmental scan of infection prevention and control behaviour change campaigns (IPAC Action Plan, 2015).

Purpose

The purpose of the Environmental Scan of Infection Prevention and Control Behaviour Change Campaigns is to examine the complexities of changing healthcare workers' behaviour and to better understand how the use theories, models and strategies can be used to bring about behavioural change.

Learn More