VIPTA is a statewide infection prevention and control education collaborative, led by the Virginia Healthcare-Associated Infections Advisory Group. Through partnership, VIPTA curates IPC resources for Virginia’s healthcare, congregate care, and public health settings.
From Burnout to Buy-In: Fun, Fast Trainings That Energize Infection Prevention Efforts
Keeping staff engaged in infection prevention is not easy, especially when everyone is stretched thin. The good news is that learning can be fun, quick, and energizing while still reinforcing best practices.
What to expect:
- VIPTC Escape Room: Step into the Virginia Infection Prevention Training Center’s digital escape room, where your team must stop Candida auris before it spreads. With digital videos, interactive puzzles, and just the right sense of adventure, this training turns infection prevention into a shared experience staff will not forget.
- Infection Prevention Games: Whether you have just a few minutes or a full training day, PICNet’s toolkit of infection prevention games have something ready to go. Try a quick Infection Control Scrabble round at shift change, set up a Sherlock Holmes Case of the Missing Microbes for a skills fair, or use crosswords and word searches as light refreshers.
- Infection Prevention Training Power Tools: Bring infection prevention to life with hands-on activities like Caught Red-Handed (using paint to reveal missed hand hygiene spots), hosting a PPE fashion show, or even creating your own educational game.
Why It Works: When staff get to laugh, work together, and solve problems as a team, the lessons stick and the workplace culture gets stronger.
Target Audience: Essential IPC Education Level
Taking Antimicrobial Stewardship Beyond Hospital Walls: Community Outreach for Smarter Antibiotic Use
In an innovative effort to extend antimicrobial stewardship beyond the hospital setting, Carilion Clinic’s Antimicrobial Stewardship (AMS) team launched a community outreach initiative aimed at educating families about appropriate antibiotic use. Patient expectations play a key role in outpatient antibiotic prescribing. Meaningful conversations between patients and providers around antibiotic necessity are needed.
Carilion aimed to deliver accessible messaging through visually engaging billboards across southwest Virginia, reinforcing public health messages such as “Antibiotics don’t work on viruses” and “Antibiotics aren’t always the answer when you are sick.” Complementary posters in clinic waiting rooms provided patients and families with quick education, addressing common misconceptions about antibiotics for viral infections and raising awareness about potential antibiotic harms.
To further support their youngest patients, the AMS team partnered with a large pediatric practice to distribute “fever care kits” to improve at-home temperature tracking and symptom relief. Each kit contained a thermometer, simple symptom relief items, and an educational bookmark on fever and infections. These tangible resources helped empower caregivers to manage mild illnesses confidently at home and understand when antibiotics and healthcare visits might be unnecessary.
Early feedback from clinicians has been overwhelmingly positive, many of whom reported that these initiatives facilitated more productive conversations with patients about antibiotics. By bringing stewardship principles directly into the community, this is one more way Carilion’s AMS team is helping to reduce antibiotic misuse, slow the development of resistance, and preserve antibiotics’ effectiveness for future generations.
