You first met Karen L. Martin, RN, BS, MPH, CIC, in the September issue of Infection Control Today, when we took a look at the success Martin has had in uniting infection prevention (IP) and environmental services (ES) at Advocate Christ Medical Center and Hope Children’s Hospital in Oak Lawn, Ill., as the director of both departments. Martin was selected as the 2010 ICT Educator of the Year because of her outstanding work in developing partnerships that have reduced infection rates, sped up room turnover, and overall improved the way that IP and ES communicate and work together to protect patients from healthcare-acquired infections (HAIs).
A series of personnel changes and departmental reorganizations at her facility allowed Martin to focus new time and energy on overhauling the ES department and place renewed emphasis on environmental cleaning within the context of her expertise in infection prevention and control. As infection control director, Martin had already been working with ES staff from an education standpoint, but the reorganization allowed her to start making key changes, such as raising the bar on ES managers’ and supervisors’ professional credentials, empowering staff members to create positive change, and most importantly, retraining staff on the importance of making HAI prevention a priority.
Influenza infection, both H1N1 and seasonal, has become a significant opportunity to educate hospital employees and the local community, Martin reports, adding that while H1N1 influenza cases have been sporadic over the summer, within the last several weeks the hospital has had a number of flu-related hospitalizations. From a flu-education standpoint, Martin says Christ Advocate has been working with physician groups as well as reaching out to the community via advertisements in local newspapers to instruct the general public about influenza.
“Through the ads our hospital acknowledged that because there are so many people getting sick, we need to explain when people should come to the hospital emergency department and when they should just stay home and do the routine flulike-illness care,” Martin explains. “We also educated them that if they do come to the hospital, it doesn’t necessarily mean we are going to test for H1N1 flu. We do the respiratory antigen profiles, the PCRs, but our labs can only do a capacity of 1,000 a day from all of the hospitals they do, so we’re not going to test everybody like we did in April and May.”
