APIC's CDS Education Committee Member Discusses Cleaning Resources and Ambulatory IPs

Environmental hygiene is a critical aspect of an infection preventionists’ (IPs’) daily work. To address cleaning, disinfection, and sterilization, This year’s autumn Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology’s (APIC’s) Cleaning, Disinfection, Sterilization Conference (CDS) was held virtually on November 10 and 11, 2022. The platform and session recordings will remain available to attendees and exhibitors until February 28, 2023. Shannon Simmons, DHSc, MPH, CIC, an IP at Christus Health, Dallas, Texas, and a member of the APIC CDS Committee spoke to Infection Control Today^® (ICT^®) about the presentations that she monitored.

“The goal is to make sure that infection prevention is to have a resource and some discussion on what again, is a very hot topic and infection prevention, especially with regulatory agencies, and a lot of things changing with different companies,” Simmons told ICT^®. “It's everyone coming together [and] discussing how to make some of these standards and recommendations, a practical application of them in our different spaces, and people providing what they've done and what could be a possible use for others in the infection prevention world.”

I urge everyone to pay attention to this area [because it is only going to grow]; there's going to be new technology hopefully to help us as things continue to grow and expand.

In this exclusive interview with ICT^®, she also describes her work at Christus Health as an ambulatory infection preventionist. “This is a new role created for the company, realizing [that] in the ambulatory settings and clinics, urgent care centers and ambulatory surgery centers, there's not necessarily a dedicated IP in the facility, but [the ambulatory IP] do still have some of the same kind of requirements and standards as our hospitals’ [IPs]. They needed that resource, someone knowledgeable in the area of infection prevention to guide them through some of the things they needed to accomplish.”