| Abstract: |
| Nowadays multidrug-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (MDR-E) is a significant public health threat in many European countries. While traditional infection control strategies primarily target the containment of intra-hospital transmission, there is growing evidence highlighting the importance of inter-hospital patient traffic for the spread of MDR-E within healthcare systems.
We propose a network based model, which reflects a patient traffic in healthcare system and thus will provide the framework to systematic study of transmission dynamics of MDR-E and the effectiveness of infection control strategies to contain their spread within healthcare systems. Although model dynamics is based on the network structure, the spread of bacteria in the healthcare facilities is directly modelled by systems of ordinary equations.
Our study is based on real anonymized patients` hospitalization data. However, due to the a strong emphasis on the privacy of patients, the hospitalization records available for our research are therefore limited. We would like to demonstrate what are the problems and limitations with derivation of a patient transmission network from these data and how to overcome them by presenting example(s) of such networks. Next we show preliminary results concerning simulations of infection spread within the network. |
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