Huntingdon Road Surgery

1 Huntingdon Road Cambridge CB3 0DB

Tel: 01223 364127 Fax: 01223 322541

www.huntingdonroadsurgery.co.uk

Infection Prevention and Control

Report

July 2017

Summary of IPC activities in 2016-17

1. IPC Administration

IPC meetings now include a member of the administrative team who provides support for the IPC team. Meetings are more efficient and action taken more efficiently.

All documents relating to IPC matters are available to all staff in the practice joint filespace Infection Control folder and publically in the Infection Control pages of the practice website at huntingdondonroadsurgery.co.uk

2. IPC Meetings

The IPC team met quarterly to discuss IPC matters. Minutes are available to all staff in the practice joint filespace and publically online.

3. IPC Training programme

The locality IPC lead nurses have commended the surgery on its hand hygiene programme, which continues. In 2016-17 81% of staff received face-2-face training on hand hygiene, with 100% of staff having had that training within the last 2 years.

Feedback from clinical staff was that the online training aspect of the IPC mandatory training was not clinically useful or applicable to general practice, particularly to those repeating the same training modules a second time around. No suitable alternatives were identified.

In response to this feedback the online components have been removed from the training programme and instead there will be external IPC speaker meetings for all staff to update. The first of these is booked for Autumn 2017.

4. IPC Audit – Cleanliness

The IPC team undertook an audit of the cleanliness of several areas of the practice. Standards were generally very high. As a result of the audit there have been some modifications to the contract cleaning schedules and feedback to the contractors about cleaning standards. This continues to be under management review.

IPC Audit – Sharps bins prescribing

As a follow-up to the previous IPC audit on sharps in 2015-16, a review of the prescribing of sharps bins was undertaken. Learning points were shared with prescribers. The audit will be repeated in 2017-18.

5. Handling sharps returns

Following the highly successful sharps handling audit in 2015 changes were made to the way the practice handles requests for sharps returns. Principally these were to redirect patients to the use of their local council clinical waste collection service. The changes were well accepted by patients and were very popular with staff, but importantly have been successful in reducing the risk of inoculation injury to staff.

6. Waste management policy – UPDATED – going Green

The practice has recently made changes to waste handling which allow us to separate off appropriate recyclable waste. We continue to look for opportunities to be more environmentally friendly. The current versions of all IPC polices are available on the practice website.

Healthcare associated infection (HAI) 2016-17

The practice continues assist the locality IPC leads in their root cause analysis of cases of HAIs when they occur.

1. MRSA septicaemia following infected arterial ulceration. October 2016. Root cause analysis and significant event investigation suggested that this could not have been prevented. However GP documentation could have been improved by recording a clear plan regarding the use of antibiotics to have at home in case of infection. No further learning points were identified. The case was attributed jointly between secondary and primary care.

2. C difficile following discharge from hospital. November 2016. Root cause analysis revealed to learning points and the case was attributed to secondary care.

We recognise that antibiotic prescribing has an important role to play in HAIs and continue to actively manage our antibiotic prescribing habits in addition to our IPC work.

Dr David Hayton

IPC Lead