PIPD Update Sept 13, 2024

Kudos

Ari, Prianka, and Sheila for doing ++ transfers all day Sept 11

The whole team (nurses, doctors etc.) for amazing care over the last month (family of E.H.). 

Heather and Karen for extending from a busy day to a busy night to help out! We were lost without you. 

Hospital Acquired Infections

In the last two weeks we have had 4 Rhino, 1 paraflu, 1 C.Diff, and 1 VRE case identified as being hospital acquired infections attributed to our unit. All cases excluding the VRE have occurred in unit 3. Our overarching view of the HAI infection problem is that regardless of cause or fault, it is our collective responsibility to find solutions to prevent causing further harm. 

Our standards of care, that need to be applied on every shift for every patient include:

- every patient on admission must be screened both for symptoms and AROs using the forms included in the admission package. 

- Every patient on precautions must have their precautions updated in SCM for support services to know what level of precautions are in place. Door signage is required but not enough. 

- Educating and informing patients/families/visitors about precautions. There are useful Patient Information handouts for all types of precautions including specifics on TB, Noro, CPO, and C.diff and include simple explanations and expectations of family/visitors. These came be given to families on admission, when reminding people of expectations, or when you are troubleshooting someone else having given the family the wrong information and you are trying to correct things. SHA Infonet, search "ipac patient information" and it should be the first or second search result and looks like this:

As always:

• Please do hand hygiene between rooms.
• Please do not put patients at the desk for the time being or if they are on any precautions
• holding any infant/child when feeding, cuddling etc. wear a gown regardless if they are on precautions or not. 
• Please wear PPE with attention to proper donning and doffing.
• Chart sick contacts that come to the room so that IPAC sees it when doing contact tracing

Help with nonpatient care work - we are looking for staff who are interested in doing some extra work as a N95 Fit Tester, TLR trainer, and Hand Hygiene auditor. It's easy work and involves some paid training. Please talk to Jonathan or Fiona if interested.