This study aimed to evaluate the preparedness and adherence of Brazilian care home managers to the recommendations of the World Health Organization infection prevention and control guidance for long-term care facilities in the context of COVID-19. The authors created a 46-item questionnaire using the ‘Infection prevention and control guidance for long-term care facilities in the context of COVID-19’, published by the World Health Organization on March 21st, 2020. We divided the questionnaire into nine sections: prevention, physical distance within the institution, rules for visitors, prospective surveillance for COVID-19 among residents, prospective surveillance among employees, source control, restrictions on movement and transportation, provision and availability of personal protective and cleaning equipment, technical support to face the pandemic. We created a global score of adherence to the IPC guidance based on the adoption of 20 questions related to IPC original questionnaire. We considered it as ‘excellent’ when at least 14/20 recommendations (70%) were fulfilled, as ‘good’ when 10 to 13 questions (50 – 69%),  and ‘low’ when less than 12 items (<49%) were answered positively. We recorded the overall number of deaths and residents (and mortality rates) informed by care home managers in 2019 and 2018, and hope to compare this data with 2020 next year and identify if adherence to IPC recommendations influenced these rates.

Paper under review and a pre-print version published in medRxiv:

Impact of long-term care facility size on preparedness and adherence to infection prevention and control guidance for the mitigation of COVID-19

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.12.21258774v1