NEW HOPE INFECTION PREVENTION SOCIETY
Promoting Patient Safety
The control of infection is everybody’s responsibility. Please wash your hands and make optimal use of the hand hygiene units situated throughout the hospital and in each ward. Service users and their relatives /visitors are informed that they can ask staff if they have performed hand hygiene before attending to them and also request staff to practice hand hygiene.
Our Team
Who are we?
- Assistant director of nursing
- Clinical nurse specialists
- Administrative assistants
- Consultant microbiologists
- Surveillance scientist
- Antimicrobial pharmacist
- Medical laboratory scientists in microbiology
What do we do?
The infection prevention and control team (IPCT) work together with all grades and disciplines of the staff of NEW HOPE Hospital to promote the health and safety of patients, staff and visitors by minimising or eliminating the risk of transmission of infection.
We develop and participate in programmes designed to inform, educate, advise and train staff and patients about infection control issues.
We participate in a daily microbiology laboratory round which enables us to identify potential infection hazards, provide advice on appropriate management and placement of patients with an infection.
We carry out surveillance of problem organisms and healthcare associated infections within the hospital and communicate results of these to healthcare staff and management.
We also undertake audits of antibiotic use and provide education to staff on the optimal use of antibiotics.To monitor trends and feed this information back to the nurses and doctors to allow them to make clinical judgements on patients care including MRSA, Clostridium difficile, bacteraemia, septicaemia and all other healthcare associated infections
To nurses, doctors, GPs and the public. The infection prevention and control nurses visit the wards on a daily basis to address infection prevention and control issues directly within the patient environment
If an outbreak occurs the team provides daily advice to manage the situation and to minimise disruption to essential services
When products are developed which may benefit our patients we trial them. If the trials are favourable, the team can make business cases for integrating them into our care provision.
To ensure that the Trust’s infection control policies are in line with national guidance and best practice and that information on common infections is available for patients, relatives and carers.