López-García, M orcid.org/0000-0003-3833-8595 and Kypraios, T orcid.org/0000-0002-6190-4762 (2018) A unified stochastic modelling framework for the spread of nosocomial infections. Interface, 15 (143). ISSN 1742-5689
Abstract
Over the last years, a number of stochastic models have been proposed for analysing the spread of nosocomial infections in hospital settings. These models often account for a number of factors governing the spread dynamics: spontaneous patient colonization, patient–staff contamination/colonization, environmental contamination, patient cohorting or healthcare workers (HCWs) hand-washing compliance levels. For each model, tailor-designed methods are implemented in order to analyse the dynamics of the nosocomial outbreak, usually by means of studying quantities of interest such as the reproduction number of each agent in the hospital ward, which is usually computed by means of stochastic simulations or deterministic approximations. In this work, we propose a highly versatile stochastic modelling framework that can account for all these factors simultaneously, and which allows one to exactly analyse the reproduction number of each agent at the hospital ward during a nosocomial outbreak. By means of five representative case studies, we show how this unified modelling framework comprehends, as particular cases, many of the existing models in the literature. We implement various numerical studies via which we (i) highlight the importance of maintaining high hand-hygiene compliance levels by HCWs, (ii) support infection control strategies including to improve environmental cleaning during an outbreak and (iii) show the potential of some HCWs to act as super-spreaders during nosocomial outbreaks.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2018 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
Keywords: | hospital-acquired or nosocomial infections; antibiotic-resistant bacteria; infection control; stochastic model; Markov chain; reproduction number |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Mathematics (Leeds) > Applied Mathematics (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number MRC MR/N014855/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 16 May 2018 12:30 |
Last Modified: | 16 Dec 2024 15:23 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | The Royal Society |
Identification Number: | 10.1098/rsif.2018.0060 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:130955 |