INFECTION CONTROL
How to digitise your IPC strategy Insights from a global IPC award winner
Amy Sarcevic
Amy Sarcevic
For many healthcare professionals, face masks, shields and soap have been the hallmark images of infection prevention and control (IPC) throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. But for an award-winning hospital in Saudi Arabia, digits, dashboards and data cards have become a more fitting emblem.
K
haled Alnafee and colleagues at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre recently installed a program that digitises every IPC-related task across the hospital. From microbiology results to pharmaceutical shopping-list items and HAI case numbers, every bit of data a practitioner might need to execute an IPC strategy is visible on a single portal, at the click of a button. If the national criteria for benchmarking HAIs changes, an algorithm will automatically update it. If an IPC report is required for a board meeting, the program will automatically generate it. And if a physician is undertaking surveillance, the program will create a spreadsheet showing contamination rates, MDROs and the number of blood cultures from a central or referral line.
Filling the gaps
While auditing the new software for efficacy, Alnafee — who has since won a global award for his efforts — was surprised to find a string of errors, omissions and misinformation. Not 24
HOSPITAL + HEALTHCARE
WINTER 2022
in his digital program, but in the paper-based system that preceded it. “We continued using the paper-based system for a full year alongside our software, in a bid to detect and rectify any issues with the new program. This involved continuously crosschecking the output with the handwritten notes staff were producing,” Alnafee said. “In doing this, we found that some of the notes compiled by practitioners were incomplete or unclear, meaning we couldn’t establish a full dataset for a particular patient or ward. “The digital program has helped fill in these gaps and give us a much clearer picture of where we are at in terms of our IPC efforts.”
Raising standards
As a result of the digitisation, almost all key performance indicators (KPI) in relation to IPC are tracking well above benchmark. These KPIs are displayed in colour-coded format on the program dashboard.
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