Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) continue to pose a major challenge to healthcare professionals in all healthcare settings. On any given day, about one in 25 hospital patients has at least one healthcare-associated infection (HAI) in the United States alone. Globally, the HAI rates are generally significantly higher. HAIs cause significant morbidity and mortality. Recognition of the burden and cost to patients, hospitals and healthcare systems, and preventability of HAIs has resulted in new initiatives to improve evidence-based infection prevention practices and new research to better understand the pathogenesis of HAIs and to develop novel approaches to prevention.

Although substantial progress in HAI prevention has been made over the past decade, many opportunities for improvement remain and new challenges continue to arise. Pathogens do not require a visa to travel internationally. We have seen more common pathogen threats in different parts of the world and should benefit from a collective sharing of recent advances in investigation, prevention, and management of HAIs from the international community.

The aim and the scope of this special issue is to provide a dedicated platform to encourage international infection preventionists, researchers, and policy makers to summarize and share where they achieved evidence-based progress or made significant discovery/innovation in investigating, surveillance of, and preventing healthcare-associated infections. The hospital infection prevention practitioners and directors in developing countries are especially welcome to submit. High-quality original research and holistic review articles of the current state of the art are also encouraged.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Effective and efficient surveillance methods especially for hand hygiene compliance, early detection of MDRO outbreak, and other preventable HAIs
• Advances in preventing ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP), central line-associated bloodstream infection (CLABSI), surgical site infection (SSI), and catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI)
• Improving risk adjustment for HAIs
• Cost-effectiveness analysis of various infection prevention approaches
• Molecular epidemiology approach in investigating HAIs
• Epidemiology, pathogenesis, and prevention of HAIs in settings across the spectrum of healthcare (acute, primary, extended care, etc.)
• Evidence-based new technologies and products in HAI prevention
• Initiation and management of multisite research including study design and meaningful analysis for practice improvement