Quality of information: a European challenge.

Since the end of the 1970s, many countries have started to set up programmes to control healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) and to achieve a safe and sustainable development of their healthcare facilities that minimises the risk of infection. Surveillance is a usual component of any organised programme to address the problem either at national, regional or local level. So a considerable effort has been made by the national Public Health Authorities of EU Member States to foster and extend the surveillance of HAI via the production of increasingly standardised indicators. This information is used by Infection Control teams to implement preventive strategies, to evaluate the magnitude of the problem and to understand variations in the risks of HAI. At the same time, Public Health authorities and healthcare financing agencies in several countries have attempted to generalise the production of such indicators at an official level and use them as a global approach for hospital quality assessment, accreditation, continuous quality improvement and communication with patients and the general population.