Annual Report 2017
Office of Infection Control and Prevention
Keiji Okinaka, Asako Hashimoto, Nobuo Mochizuki, Takuya Yamaguchi
Introduction
The Office of Infection Control and Prevention was established in October 2016. The objective of our office is to promote the practice of hospital infection control in order to reduce transmission of communicable diseases among patients, health care workers, and visitors.
Routine activities
Our missions are:
- Development of infection control policies and in-hospital guidelines
- Managing the surveillance system of healthcare associated with infections and drug resistant bacteria in order to prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases
- Inspecting and improving quality of hospital environment using ward rounds
- Inspecting and improving compliance with hand hygiene and other infection control measures using ward rounds
- Offering consulting services regarding infection control problems
- Preventing and managing needle stick injuries
- Vaccination for staff with insufficient protective immunity
- Planning to do employee's education and educational campaigns for the purpose to promote infection control and antimicrobial stewardship
- Planning conferences among regional hospitals to promote the improvement of infection control in each hospital
- Promoting antimicrobial stewardship
Research activities
Hashimoto presented at the domestic annual meeting about our measures to maintain medical care environment during renovation work inside the hospital.
Mochizuki presented at the international meeting about our anti-cancer drugs preparation process to assure sterility.
Education
We have conducted staff education on various infection control practices, which includes lectures based on up-to-date evidence and on-site feedback regarding the results of ward rounds. In this year, we held four lectures on vaccines for healthcare workers, antimicrobials, antimicrobial resistant organisms and the basis of isolation precautions.
Future prospects
This year, we had implemented direct observation methodology to evaluate health workers' hand hygiene compliance. By using these data, we created an action plan for improvement in compliance with hand hygiene. As a result, the median compliance rate increased from 43% to 60%. We keep trying to increase the isolation precautions compliance rate and creating safe patient care through appropriate infection control measures.
We are planning to establish the antimicrobial stewardship team and to further promote antimicrobial stewardship.
Figure 1. Trends in the rate of hand hygiene adherence- Median compliance rate in each ward
