Infection Prevention and Control Service, Imperial College Healthcare Trust
One of the Trust’s top priorities is to continuously drive up standards of care to ensure that patients do not contract any preventable infections when they are in one of our hospitals. We take infection prevention seriously, and have a strong reputation in this field, with an infectious diseases consultant at director level.
The infection prevention and control service sits corporately with clear affiliation with the Centre for Patient Safety and Service Quality and Centre for Infection Prevention Management. It provides cross cutting expert advice to the clinical programme groups. The team has consultant support from microbiology and infectious diseases, dedicated infection control consultants and a strong working relationship with pharmacy. We have a dedicated data and epidemiology team which has a strong interface with the community and other healthcare providers. We have a range of ways to improve and monitor standards of care in order to prevent and reduce the amount of hospital acquired infections and ensure we use antibiotics with care.
- A senior infection nurse is allocated to each clinical programme group (CPG) as expert advisor to the clinical and management teams. Each CPG has a clinical lead for infection, and they are responsible for overseeing the integration of infection prevention into all aspects of clinical care, hospital management and at every level of the patient pathway. Each clinical lead is corporately responsible for infection to the Trust’s infection prevention control committee.
- Clear quality improvement monitoring of processes and outcomes related to infection prevention in every CPG and directorate, with robust data systems made available to staff and patients, enabling us to further develop our service.
- Strong Trust guidance and policy aimed at ensuring that every member of staff is aware of their role in preventing infection, such as the ‘clean your hands’ campaign and in using antibiotics wisely.
- Communicating regularly and effectively to ensure that both staff and patients adhere to good practice.
- Practical measures such as reducing the number of bed moves across our hospitals, multidisciplinary antibiotic rounds and senior clinical leads in each directorate.
We oversee an extensive MRSA screening programme that addresses elective and emergency admissions.
An important development in the management of C.difficile is an integrated approach and the use of multidisciplinary antibiotic rounds to ensure we are not inappropriately administering antibiotics and thereby heightening the risk of resistance.
We have implemented an extensive electronic system to collect bedside data and monitor care bundle compliance thus enabling the wards and departments to use audit and data as a driver for quality improvement.
INFECTION PREVENTION AND CONTROL COLLABORATING STAFF
Komal Whittikar-Axon, Manager IPC
Darren Nelson, General Manager of IPC
Rosa Coello Healthcare Epidemiologist and Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer
