The Infection Prevention and Control Team is made up of the Director of Infection Prevention and Control (DIPC), Consultant Microbiologists, Infection Prevention and ControlNurses, an IV Nurse Specialist, a Surveillance Co-ordinator, Infection Prevention Assistants, Antibiotic Pharmacists and Admin Assistants.
The role of the Infection Prevention and Control Team is to ensure that the risk of infection to patients, visitors and staff is minimised through a range of prevention and control processes. The team closely monitors infection rates and undertakes audits to maintain consistently high standards across all sites.
Members of the team are actively involved in:
- Education – to ensure staff are up to date with safe working practice.
- Audit – to monitor aspects of patient care and environmental standards.
- Surveillance – 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.
- Advice – 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.
- Outbreak Management – if an outbreak occurs the team provides daily advice to manage the situation and to minimise disruption to essential services.
- Research – 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.
- Information – 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.
Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has adopted the World Health Organisation’s “Your 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene” campaign. These guidelines on hand hygiene in the health care setting define the key moments for hand hygiene. They are focussed at the point of care itself and in the immediate patient environment because this provides the maximum protection to our patients.
Infection Control is the responsibility of every member of staff and can have an impact on every patient. Our hospital acquired infection rates are used as an indicator of the quality of patient care.
You can find more information on our policies, information for patients and infection rates on this website.
For more information about infection control see the following websites:
