Infection control


Infection control


Stop the spread


Hospitals are places of healing; at least that’s the way most of us view them. But with the number of invasive procedures, open wounds and bacteria present, the inside of a healthcare facility can also present a high risk of infection to patients. Add the fact that staff have been dealing with a highly infectious virus for the past three years of the Covid-19 pandemic, and infection preventionists have had their work cut out. Hailey Hudson speaks to Dr Hilary Babcock, director of Infectious Disease Prevention and chief quality officer at BJC Healthcare, and Erica Susky, an infection control practitioner based out of Toronto, Canada, to find out how both have been working to keep infections down as much as possible amid changing government requirements.


T


he infection risk present in hospitals has been a concern for hundreds of years. In the US, hospitals first introduced infection control as a formal discipline in the 1950s. Since the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020, however, hospitals have been facing a level of infection risk they’ve never seen before. “Staff were inundated with patients,” says Dr Hilary Babcock, director of Infectious


Practical Patient Care / www.practical-patient-care.com


Disease Prevention and chief quality officer at BJC Healthcare. “Most infection prevention programmes really had to switch into sort of an all hands on deck response mode.” In practice, this meant hospitals had to make sure they had appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) and the right kinds of isolation spaces for patients – all while educating staff on how to protect themselves and patients.


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