Case Study3 Infections-C. difficile (CDI)149 Your infection prevention departmen
ID: 326534 • Letter: C
Question
Case Study3 Infections-C. difficile (CDI)149 Your infection prevention department has reported that there is a cluster of cases of hospital. acquired CDI on the medical unit. The infection preventionists have put all the cases on con- tact isolation and are meeting with the manager of the unit as well as environmental services to develop a plan. Questions 1. What are the next steps? 2. What other staff should be involved? 3. When do you tell patients and families about the cluster of cases? 4. How do you educate staff, patients, and visitors regarding prevention measures!Explanation / Answer
A-1 The immediate steps are as follows :-
1) The first and the foremost thing in such a situation is to prevent spread of diseases. For this, initially all the infected staff should be kept in isolation and then treated. As the infection is most probably communicable, special precautions need to taken for this.
2) Sterilization of all the hospital equipments with immediate effect. The members of staff would have touched a lot of euipments, and there's no way to know which were those. So, it's better to sterilise all of them. Also sterilization should be ionic based so as to kill the bacteria.
3) A definite handwashing regulation should be established to stop any further carriage of bacteria. Glove wearing too should be made mandatory.
4) After the above three steps, treatment of the staff becomes the priority of the hospital as the hospital would be drastically low on staff. Hence it is important to carry out the treatment as soon as possible.
A-2 To not make this situation an epidemic, only few of the staff members should be selected based upon the type of infection that has been spread and their respective expertise. Any staff member who isn't that comfortable with dealing with infections should not be allowed to carry out this process. Usage of all the uninfected staff members is strictly unadvised as if the treatment staff too get infected, these left staff would be the ones who would have to carry out the procedure.
A-3 It is important to tell the patients and families about the prevailing situation as soon as possible so that they can make an informed decision about whether to stay in this hospital only or go to the other one. If somehow one of the other patients or family members become infected, it can result in serious decrease in brand value of the hospital.
A-4 Few of the things that can be done by hospital management to trin its staff are :-
1) Training sessions related to encountering of such situation can be conducted. These training sessions should consists of mock drills of any such situation happening as these drills would tell the staff about how to carry oneself during such times,
2) A cleaning regulation must be established which then should be followed by everyone. Strict actions hsould be taken aginst those who go against it.
3) Diagnose of certain such prevalent diseases should be taught to the staff. This would help the staff to know about the situation quicker as they don't have to wait for the physician to diagnose.