Fostering Collaboration Between Infection Prevention and Environmental Services

At Hunterdon, Roye-Horn says, all ES personnel are required to attend an annual infection control update lecture, while infection control is invited to share its successes and failures with plenty of data and feedback at ES staff meetings. The facility also holds its annual ES Week celebration. Additional strategies for fostering collaboration include making a business case for infection prevention and ensuring that it is a team effort, and using financial data in a proactive manner to support the need for more ES employees so that patient-touchable surfaces can be cleaned daily in high-risk areas of the hospital. It’s essential for both departments to “own” the facility’s infection prevention issues, as well as to approach administrators regarding the infection prevention team’s concerns, operational needs or requests relating to resource allocation.

It comes down to resources, says Roye-Horn, who emphasizes in her presentations that it has become the norm in healthcare to under-invest in infection prevention and environmental cleaning. “There are always going to be very limited resources in healthcare,” she says. “Yet you will always need to make a very large investment in the care of patients, as it should be. Whether you can afford all of the people, tools, technologies and resources you want is certainly going to be doubtful. People will have to prioritize which ones have the best data, or which things make the most sense or which things they can afford, and it’s always going to be something each institution must figure out for itself.”

“We’re certainly getting an added push to do the right thing from agencies like CMS,” Roye-Horn adds. “In some facilities, ICPs and ES directors have an easier time of getting their points across without having to have federal regulation hang over their heads. They may have the ear of somebody who holds the facility’s purse strings, or they may be able to get themselves an audience with their administrative executives. But in many facilities, that is difficult and doesn’t happen very readily. Still, I’d like to think there are places where hospital CEOs and CFOs are the ones coming to ICPs and ES directors with questions rather than us having to get their attention all the time.”