Infection Control Matters

In this podcast, Phil and Brett talk to Adjunct Professor Alison McMillan on the topics of leadership and negotiation. Alison is Australia's Chief Nursing and Midwifery Officer. We hear first hand experiences related to COVID and tips for building relationships and nursing leadership.

Professor (Practice) Alison McMillan PSM was appointed as Australia's Chief Nursing and Midwifery Officer in November 2019. In June 2021 Alison was awarded a Public Service Medal for outstanding public service to driving the Government’s national health response priorities during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly to infection prevention measures. 

In the last ACIPC conference special podcast, Brett and Phil talk to Stephanie Curtis about wearable proximity devices for nurses and doctors - and their use for contact tracing. We also talk about other potential uses. Stephanie is an epidemiologist at the National Critical Care and Trauma Response Centre. She worked on the COVID-19 response in Victoria over 2020-2021 and recently completed Australia's field epidemiology training program, the MAE, based at Alfred Health and Burnet Institute.

Stephanie's presented findings from pilot work of proximity trackers at the ACIPC conference. The paper for this study is published in Infection, Disease and Health https://www.idhjournal.com.au/article/S2468-0451(21)00098-5/fulltext 

In this second special edition from the 2021 ACIPC Conference, Brett Mitchell and Martin Kiernan talk to Drs Mary Wyer and Su-yin Hor. Mary and Su-Yin's work on Video Reflexive Ethnography (VRE - not that one) is world-reknowned with many publications. In this discussion they outline how the use of  video to examine and develop practice has helped in biopreparedness as well as its uses in other areas of infection prevention and control and nurse education.

Papers referred to in this podcast:

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32089464/

In this special ACIPC conference episode, Brett Mitchell and Martin Kiernan talk to Dr Gillian-Ray-Barruel, from Griffith University School of Nursing and Midwifery and QEII Jubilee Hospital, Brisbane.

Gillian is presenting at the 2021 virtual ACIPC Conference on urinary catheter awareness. Gillian has an long standing interest in medical device placement, and this paper focuses on patient and staff awareness of the need for the catheter. Naturally we digress into other areas such as consent and nurse advocacy!

Papers that we refer to in this session:

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11042237/

In this podcast, Martin Kiernan talks to Dr Alicia Demirjian about the issue of seemingly increasing reports of Staphylococcus capitis cases in neonates. Alicia is Consultant Epidemiologist at the Evelina Children's hospital in London and leads the antimicrobial resistance and prescribing team at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) - formerly Public Health England. Alicia has been working on this issue for a while now and we discuss the problem (and if there is one), findings to date and possible interventions. Some of the papers that we discuss are here, as is a link to the video on how to clean an incubator, a complex piece of equipment that is often still contaminated after cleaning and disinfection.

Cleaning video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF-0MTFJfE

Papers:

Wirth, T., M. Bergot, et al (2020) Niche specialization and spread of Staphylococcus capitis involved in neonatal sepsis. Nat Microbiol, 5, 735-745. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32341568

Thorn, L. M., et al (2020) Risk factors for Staphylococcus capitis pulsotype NRCS-A colonisation among premature neonates in the neonatal intensive care unit of a tertiary-care hospital: a retrospective case-control study. Infect Prev Pract, 2, 100057. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34368703

In this episode, Martin Kiernan talks to Prof Heather Loveday, Director of the Richard Wells Research Centre at the University of West London about an lecture recently given at the 2021 IPS Conference. The topic discussed centres on the role that fundamental care has in the prevention of healthcare-associated infections and the impact of 'missed' care.

Papers for futher reading on these topics are listed below.

Journal of Clinical Nursing special issue on fundamental care: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/13652702/2018/27/11-12

In this week's episode, Martin Kiernan talks to Dr Jon Otter of Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital NHS Trust in the UK about a couple of Jon's recent blog postings on the popular "Reflections" blog (https://reflectionsipc.com/). We first discuss a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that reported on a study that examined the use of monoclonal antibodies in preventing infection in unvaccinated household contacts of COVID that can be found here https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2109682.

Then we go on to discuss Jon's recent presentation on future priorities for iPC in healthcare, the slides for which are available here (https://jonotter.files.wordpress.com/2021/10/211014-the-future-of-healthcare-and-ipc.pptx).

In this episode, Prof Brett Mitchell talks to Dr Carl-Johan Frankel from the Department of Infection Control, Lund University, Sweden about his recent paper examining the risk of transmission of Norovirus to roomates. Does norovirus transmit readily to other occupants? The findings may well surprise you! The paper is here: https://www.journalofhospitalinfection.com/article/S0195-6701(21)00313-3/fulltext

Other papers referred to:

Risk of transmission to subsequent room occupants: https://www.journalofhospitalinfection.com/article/S0195-6701(15)00312-6/fulltext

Prolonged environmental survival of small round structured viruses: https://www.journalofhospitalinfection.com/article/S0195-6701(97)90230-9/pdf