The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have released a free on-line training course in infection prevention and control for nursing home staff in the long-term care setting.  

The Nursing Home Infection Preventionist Training Course is available on CDC's TRAIN website.

According to the CMS announcement, “[t]he course includes information about the core activities of an infection prevention and control program, with a detailed explanation of recommended practices to prevent pathogen transmission and reduce healthcare-associated infections and antibiotic resistance in nursing homes. Additionally, this course provides helpful implementation resources (e.g., training tools, checklists, signs, and policy and procedure templates).”

Notably, the CMS memorandum indicates that “completion of this course will provide specialized training in infection prevention and control.”

We are cautiously optimistic that this means completion of the CMS/CDC course will be one way care centers can comply with the CMS Phase 3 requirement that a facility’s designated infection preventionist must have completed specialized training in infection prevention and control (see F882 -effective Nov. 28, 2019).

The course is approximately 19 hours long and is made up of 23 modules and submodules. The modules can be completed at any time, in any order, and over multiple sessions, depending on the learner’s schedule.

We will do some follow-up work on this CMS announcement, and provider further information in the weeks ahead.