Infection Prevention and Control

Infection Prevention and Control is everyone’s responsibility – the IPC team at St Andrew’s are committed to providing effective clinical advice and guidance to staff and service users to ensure that our patients, carers and visitors remain in a safe, secure and clean environment. The team operates in a number of areas across the charity – these can include:

Training and education - we make sure all staff are up to date with safe working practices in relation to IPC, and to understand their responsibilities towards infection prevention and control and how it affects their patients.

Audits – as the IPC team we monitor various aspects of care, for example: nursing IPC compliance and handwashing. We also undertake environmental audits where we look at cleanliness of all ward areas and also estates issues.

Surveillance - monitoring trends and increases of various Healthcare-Associated Infections (HCAI) including: MRSA and Clostridium Difficile (C-Diff).

Advice – the IPC team are on hand Monday-Friday to provide advice to all staff and patients to assist with any infection prevention and control issues/queries.

Outbreak management - if an outbreak occurs, the team provides daily advice to manage the situation. The IPC team will investigate the causes of outbreaks and provide day to day advice on prevention of further transmission

Policies - writing policies and procedures surrounding infection prevention and control with cooperation from the clinical teams.

Campaigns - the IPC team provide support with local and national campaigns such as sepsis awareness, flu, hand hygiene, and bare below the elbows.