Infection control
Patients hospitalised with Covid-19 also faced the risk of infection with other pathogens that could worsen their condition.
response, but it was a huge effort by the same people who were needed to be running things for the hospitals and doing things in the hospital.” Next, those same clinics needed to be open to the public. “All of those things had to happen while we still had to be taking care of all the patients in the hospital and taking care of our staff as well,” Babcock adds.
What’s next With Covid-19 hospitalisation rates at a much lower level now than they were earlier in the pandemic, infection control protocols have been adjusted to prioritise pre-pandemic infection risks. “For the most part, the policies that we have [now] are not based on the underlying state of the patient as much as on our knowledge of the specific infection,” Dr Babcock says. Like any rule, there are exceptions to this one; patients that are immunocompromised, for instance, may take longer to clear an infection and need to be put in isolation. “In general, we’re focusing on how the infection is transmitted and how we can interrupt that transmission,” adds Babcock. Moving forward, Susky says, some tools will remain the same. Hand hygiene, she points out, will always be the best way to prevent the spread of infections. But infection prevention and control are intrinsically evolving fields. “IPAC methods will always be changing as they are science-based, which is iterative. As new information and discoveries are made, IPAC measures will change to reflect that. We all witnessed those changes throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Experts are constantly conducting research on infectious diseases, prevention and treatments. The
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Covid-19 vaccine is a result of that research. But novel infectious diseases and the further development of antibiotic resistance are an ever- looming threat. There’s also the fact that infection control is not a perfect science. “The goal in infection control is to consider all infections as preventable,” says Susky. “However, there may be infections that could have been prevented in theory, but are not preventable in real life.” This is especially true when healthcare systems are dealing with challenges apparent prior to the pandemic, as well as those directly caused by it.
“The goal in infection control is to consider all infections as preventable. However, there may be infections that could have been prevented in theory, but aren’t in real life.” Erica Susky
“Big picture issues that are a challenge include shortages of infectious disease physicians across the country and that they are not evenly distributed,” says Babcock. “There are rural areas that may not have an infectious disease physician within hundreds of miles. That’s a challenge for hospitals that are working on infection prevention programmes.” On a lighter note, with hospitals now able to focus on more than just Covid-19, infection control practitioners like Babcock and Susky are able to turn their attention back to preventing other infections – working with staff to ingrain good practices and reliably incorporate them into the hospital workflow. “I think overall,” finishes Babcock, “things are starting to turn back in the right direction.”
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