Elements of a successful infection prevention committee.

The instruction to create fictional data for your hospital is the part of this brief that decides whether the presentation works. Numbers invented carelessly make the comparison meaningless, and everything downstream, the explanation and the three performance goals, hangs off that comparison. So build them the way a real infection preventionist would: pick two or three infection types that your state actually reports, express them as standardised infection ratios rather than raw counts so they are comparable at all, and set your hospital above the state figure on one and below it on another. A hospital that is worse at everything gives you nothing to praise and no baseline of competence to build on; a hospital that is better at everything gives the committee no reason to exist. Set one measure above the state figure and one below, so the presentation carries both a problem to solve and a competence to build on.

Choosing which infections to present is a real decision the brief hands you, so make it visibly. Central line-associated bloodstream infections, catheter-associated urinary tract infections, surgical site infections and Clostridioides difficile are the ones with established prevention bundles behind them, which matters because your three performance goals will need to point at an intervention that exists. Then pay attention to the three elements of a successful committee, since that is a research task rather than an opinion: the literature points consistently to executive sponsorship and authority to change practice, adequate trained personnel and surveillance infrastructure, and multidisciplinary membership that reaches environmental services and pharmacy rather than stopping at nursing and infection control. Finish by writing the goals as measurable targets with a timeframe, because a performance goal without a number is a value statement. Four slides of data and three of goals is roughly the right proportion here.