What's in a Name? The Face of Infection Prevention

For more than two decades I have worked in a discipline of disease prevention where the goal was to create a safe environment for employees, patients, visitors and volunteers. Infection control practitioners created policies and practices designed to prevent the transmission of infectious agents from patient to patient, patient to employee and employee to patient. This is the field always known to us in the past as infection control.

Over the last 35 years, the field of infection control has increasingly evolved in the healthcare arena. It started out as an activity in hospitals to control healthcare-acquired infections (HAIs) through mere surveillance activities which reported a number with no substantive action steps to address the risks. Today, leaders in infection control continuously explore emerging research, techniques and technologies to identify new and better ways to reduce the risk of adverse infections and complications for patients and our community. They partner with other regulatory bodies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Joint Commission (JC), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to create public policy from evidence-based practice to ensure our healthcare facilities are safe. Through these efforts, it is commonplace for leaders in the field to work with policy makers at the state, regional and federal levels and to testify before legislative bodies to explain the significance of combating HAIs in a systematic manner. This creates transparency in an era of increasing mandatory reporting requirements. The goal of infection prevention is to protect the patient, protect the healthcare worker and others inside the work environment and do those things within a low economic burden to hospitals.

Today, consumers see the value in low infection rates. Consumers are aware of the amount of time they may spend in a healthcare facility and expect (as they should) that no harm in the way of infections or any other adverse event will get in their way. Prevention is key, and the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC), our national organization, is aligning all of its efforts and planning to prevention modes. The primary goal remains to prevent infections in our patients and to protect the spread of infections from patients to healthcare workers.

In our practice, each of us in a leadership role has a responsibility to follow the lead of our organization and implement a “preventionist” approach in our individual environments. So when I became the director of the infection control program at Georgetown University Hospital (GUH) in Washington, D.C., I was given the opportunity to redesign the existing program to a mode of “prevention” versus “control” of infections. The seeds had been planted by very knowledgeable and proactive leaders before me. But now it is my journey to undertake and transform the way infection control is executed. The first thing I did was to change the name of our infection control department to the infection prevention department and the name of our infection control practitioners to infection preventionists. Our senior leaders approved the idea and felt the name sent a message to our patients and consumers that our standard mission was to “prevent” infections from occurring in the first place, not “control” them after the fact. And as preventionists, we recommend scientifically validated practices to our care providers that will significantly reduce the risk of potential harm to patients.