International Infection Prevention Week (IIPW): October 13–19, 2024
This year’s theme, “Moving the Needle on Infection Prevention,” is all about advancing infection prevention efforts and making infection prevention fun and engaging for your team.
APIC provides activities like the Build a Bug Contest or daily infection prevention Wordles. These interactive events are designed to spark creativity, teamwork, and excitement while reinforcing the best practices that keep everyone safe.
Ways to Use This Resource:
- Build a Bug Contest: Challenge your team to create their own superbug and showcase how they would stop it!
- Daily Wordle: Add some brain-teasing fun to your day with infection prevention-themed Wordles.
- Infection Prevention Challenges: Bring out the competitive spirit with trivia, scavenger hunts, and more.
Target Audience: Essential to Foundational IPC education level
My 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene
Hand hygiene is essential for patient safety, and reminders are key! The World Health Organization’s “My 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene” posters are customized to fit your work environment.
These new posters offer tailored guidance to fit different settings. Whether you’re working with patients in outpatient clinics or managing complex procedures in hemodialysis, these posters highlight the critical moments to clean your hands: before patient contact, before a clean procedure, after exposure to body fluids, after patient contact, and after touching patient surroundings.
Ways to Use This Resource
- Update your orientation and trainings with the “My 5 Moments for Hand Hygiene” poster that best matches your work environment.
- Post education posters (with a wipeable surface) in spaces where staff do hand hygiene.
Target Audience: Essential IPC education level
Adult Vaccine Activity Book
The fall respiratory vaccine season will soon be upon us, and the Adult Vaccine Activity Book from Alliant Health Solutions is a great way to get your staff engaged. This fun resource includes vaccine themed activities like word searches, word scrambles, and adult-friendly coloring pages. These activities can get the conversation started to reduce hesitancy and boost staff enthusiasm for infection prevention. Let’s gear up and make this respiratory season our safest yet!
Ways to Use This Resource
- Staff engagement: Share at huddles or drop them in break rooms; these are great to sprinkle around the facility. Try putting out a new one or two each week to keep it fresh.
Target Audience: Essential IPC education level
Whoop Whoop! New Infection Prevention Playbook for Emergency Medical Services (EMS)
EMS touch all parts of healthcare and play a critical role in the infection prevention landscape. The updated EMS Infectious Disease Playbook condenses essential information into a single, comprehensive resource. It’s designed to assist EMS agencies in developing clear, effective policies that address a wide range of infection prevention topics like dispatch procedures, transmission-based precautions, personal protective equipment, and special considerations in pediatrics and aeromedical transport.
EMS Infectious Disease Playbook from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Ways to Use This Resource
- Comprehensive Guidance: Provides streamlined workflows for education tailored to resonate with EMS personnel.
- Centralized Resource: Consolidates the latest guidelines from various sources, ensuring EMS professionals have immediate access to current standards.
Target Audience: Foundational IPC education level
Celebrating Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) in June
National Certified Nursing Assistants Week is just around the corner, running from June 13th to June 19th, 2024. Let’s take this opportunity to show our appreciation for the fantastic work our CNAs do every day in healthcare settings across Virginia. To celebrate, we’re shining a spotlight on an awesome infection prevention resource tailored specifically for CNAs.
Project Firstline Training Toolkit for Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs)
Ways to Share These Resources
- This resource covers infection prevention topics in the daily work of CNAs, such as feeding, oral care, bathing, skin/ perineal care, positioning and more.
- Plus, this training is easy to deliver with recordings of trainings, engaging PowerPoint slides, and fun knowledge checks to keep things interesting.
Target Audience: Foundational IPC education level
May 5th is World Hand Hygiene Day
Mark your calendars because May 5th is no ordinary day—it’s World Hand Hygiene Day! It’s time to roll up our sleeves and celebrate the power of clean hands in keeping us all healthy. We know it’s not always easy to find the right tools to keep those hands squeaky clean. Fear not, because we’ve got your back with an exciting bundle of resources that’ll make hand hygiene a breeze!
?️ Toolkit: APIC Toolkit for Patient Hand Hygiene
- About this resource: This toolkit is an all-encompassing resource designed to empower healthcare professionals like you to champion hand hygiene practices among patients and residents.
- Target Audience: Foundational IPC education
?️ Video: Virginia Infection Prevention Training Center – Hand Hygiene with Florence Nightingale
- About this resource: Get ready to be entertained and educated when Florence Nightingale comes to life to tell a memorable and short story on how to perform hand hygiene and why it matters in healthcare.
- Target Audience: Foundational IPC education level
? Technology: Speedy Audit
- About this resource: Speedy Audit is a free resource to track and compile your hand hygiene audits. A 2023 study showed that using Speedy Audit reduced the amount of time to complete hand hygiene analysis when compared to a paper audit tool (Libero, G., Bordino, V., Garlasco, J., Vicentini, C., & Maria Zotti, C. (2023)).
- Target Audience: Foundational to Intermediate IPC education level
So, gear up, spread the word, and let’s make this World Hand Hygiene Day the cleanest one yet!