A hundred and one organisations agreeing to do the same few things

People on dialysis have a permanent route into the bloodstream, which is
exactly what a bloodstream infection needs. The **Making Dialysis Safer for
Patients Coalition**, launched in 2016, exists to prevent those
infections.

It is a partnership rather than a programme, and its membership is the
interesting part:

One hundred and one organisations, spanning the people who run dialysis
units, the professions that staff them, the public health bodies that oversee
them, and the patients who use them.

What it actually does

Three goals, and none of them is inventing anything:

• Implement and adopt the CDC's Core Interventions, by promoting audit
  tools, checklists and other resources
• Spread the word about the Core Interventions through education
• Share skills and findings with other participants

The interventions already exist and are already known to work. The coalition's
entire job is the gap between a published best practice and it being done, in
every unit, every time.

That gap is where healthcare-associated infection prevention mostly lives. A
checklist is not a discovery; getting a hundred organisations to use the same
one — and to audit whether they did — is the hard part, and it is why the
membership list includes the patient organisations and the health departments
rather than only the providers.

People can join as Members, and organisations as Partners.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.