Infection Control Matters

In this episode, Martin is jouned by Dr Luke Moore (@dr_luke_moore), Consultant in Infectious Diseases, Clinical Microbiology and Virology at Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust in the UK and Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London. We discuss the recent paper from his group (https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-021-06159-8), the findings of which were quite surprising. Why did bacteraemia from Enterobacterales go down, Staph. aureus and Strep. pneumoniae stay the same and Coag neg staphylococci increase? Absolutely more questions are raised by this interesting paper, many of which if answered could provide benefits for antimicrobial stewardship and infection prevention activities.

In this podcast, we discuss an article just published in Clinical Infectious Disease which reports data from 134 hospitals on mortality, length of stay and costs of common infections. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32822465/

In this podcast, Martin and Brett talk healthcare associated pneumonia (HAP) with Dr Victoria Ewan. Vicky is consultant academic geriatrician at South Tees Hospitals (Middlesbrough, United Kingdom) who has undertaken ground breaking working around our understanding of HAP.

We talk about what HAP is, common causes and potential strategies to prevent. We plan on visiting this topic again at a latter date, hence this is "Part A".

Some papers we refer to in this podcast:

• https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)00275-9/fulltext

Reviews on this topic:

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31279704/

In this podcast, Brett Mitchell discusses a paper that provides an overview of available apps for HAI prevention, including functionality, quality and usefulness with two of the authors - Dr Robbert Bentvelsen (@rbentvelsen) and Ender Holten (@EnderHolt) from the Leiden University Medical Center (@LUMC_Leiden). The article "eHealth for the prevention of healthcare-associated infections: a scoping review" is published in the Journal of Hospital Infection.

In this episode, Martin talks to Consultant Clinical Scientist Dr Elaine Cloutman-Green BEM about her role at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in the UK. Elaine is the first Clinical Scientist to also have the role of Infection Control Doctor in a UK hospital and we talk about the untapped potential for Clinical Scientists to contribute to infection prevention and control teams. Elaine is also on twitter (@girlymicro) has a blog (https://girlymicrobiologist.com/) and was recently awarded a British Epire Medal in recognition of her contribution as a Clinical Scientist.

In this episode we briefly touch on the role of sociology and what it can bring to infection control. We also discuss the value of qualitative research in infection prevention and control. Our guests this week are Professor Maria Northcote (Avondale University College) and Dr Cassie Curryer (University of Newcastle). 

In this episode, Martin talks to Professor Loreen Herwaldt, from the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine.  We discuss three new papers on hand hygiene compliance that have come from data originally collected that looked at the implementation of surveillance feedback and barrier precautions for a study published in the NEJM (Huskins, W.C., et al., Intervention to reduce transmission of resistant bacteria in intensive care. N Engl J Med, 2011. 364(15): p. 1407-18. https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa1000373?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). Two new papers focusing on hand hygiene aspects of care have already been published and a third has also been accepted. The first looked at hand hygiene compliance at critical points of care (Chang, N.N., et al., Hand Hygiene Compliance at Critical Points of Care. Clin Infect Dis, 2021. 72(5): p. 814-820. https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciaa130) and the second examined the sequence of patient care (Chang, N.C., et al., Hand hygiene and the sequence of patient care. Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol, 2021: p. 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1017/ice.2021.82). The third paper that we discuss is a forthcoming paper on the time taken to perform hand hygiene.

In this podcast, Phil and Brett discuss a paper from April 2021 published by Wee and colleagues, in the American Journal of Infection Control titled "Unintended consequences of infection prevention and control measures during COVID-19 pandemic"

Full reference: Wee, L. E. I., Conceicao, E. P., Tan, J. Y., Magesparan, K. D., Amin, I. B. M., Ismail, B. B. S., ... & Ling, M. L. (2021). Unintended consequences of infection prevention and control measures during COVID-19 pandemic. American Journal of Infection Control, 49(4), 469-477. Link to paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7610096/

In this podcast, we hear from Professor Didier Pittet about how the hand hygiene campaign originated from identifying a problem in one hospital and translating that across the world. We also discuss how COVID-19 may change behaviour long term, the theme for WHO Hand Hygiene Day on the 5th May, ideas for improving hand hygiene in your institution, the use of automated hand hygiene monitoring and influencing people.

Professor Didier Pittet is an infectious diseases expert and the director of the Infection Control Programme and WHO Collaborating Centre on Patient Safety, University Hospital of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.

Global Hand Hygiene Day information can be found here https://www.who.int/campaigns/world-hand-hygiene-day/2021

The Taskforce brings together the peak health professional bodies across Australia whose members are providing clinical care to people with COVID-19. The Taskforce systematically review the literature and develop recommendations using GRADE. These are ‘living’ guidelines, updated with new research in near real-time in order to give reliable, up-to-the minute advice to clinicians providing frontline care. In this podcast, we talk to A/Professor Julian Elliott and Dr Tari Turner from the Taskforce. We discussed the role of the Taskforce, the new infection control panel, topics being explored and developing infection control recommendations.

Details about the Taskforce are here: https://covid19evidence.net.au/