Quotations and Highlights from two days of exciting lectures and discussions
- Urgent action is required with respect to antibiotic resistance
- We have to leverage the potential of entire teams – this requires leadership
- There is a fire in our house!
- Economic nonsense: curing a disease instead of preventing it
- Cost of diagnostics should be included into the budget of antibiotics
- We have to build meta competence, we have to build European competence! In both cases we have to learn from each other
- Hospitals believe that they can work separately. But they cannot. All hospitals in a region are related when it comes to HAI
- Political science should be connected to medicine.
- Hospitals are highly political places – therefore silo busting is difficult
- We could learn from the aviation industry and should exchange information horizontally
- When it comes to infection prevention – nurses are more important than we think
- Evidence is not enough. You also need to communicate it.
- Doctors and patients have the same goal, but trust is needed.
- Trust is the fuel and glue of each network.
- In hospitals we are too much our roles but we get responsibility through our functions.
- We should use standard operation procedures and stick to the basic processes
- Economic interest versus patient safety??
- Should patients assess hospitals regarding hygiene? Patients cannot easily judge it and should not be asked.
- Discussing an issue is the start of a solution
- To teach and explain is better than to pressure
- ICPIC will become a patient-included meeting this year.
- With respect to infection prevention: generation change will help.
- If you want to bust silos: you should include emotions.
- Let’s be proud of what has been achieved in the past 150 years since Semmelweis – but we are not satisfied!
- Reality often differs to what is being written down
- If you don’t have enough resources: Do less, but do it well.
- If you plan to make a program, speak with the front workers first
- Flu vaccination status in Austria: 7%
- Flu increases the chance of HAI infections – this has been known since Egon Schiele died of it 101 years ago.
- Flu vaccination also reduces the risk of MCI by 50%
- Silo mentality: The mindset is inward-looking. Silo busting may contribute to an overall failure.
- Solution for silo busting: Identify – Involve – Facilitate – Communicate!
- Semmelweis tried to bust silos
- What is silo busting? A means to change the system, a multimodal approach, monitoring and feedback, fatwa for alcohol-based hand rub
- Adapt to adopt!
- Motto of Country Hospital Villach (Corinthia, Austria): Your welfare is our concern
- Villach is a Model of patient-oriented quality
- In an average large hospital, we have 12,000 written SOPs (Standard operating procedures). An average nurse knows only 3 of them.
- You always train an orchestra together, not the violins on Monday, the trumpets on Tuesday and the drums on Wednesday.
- Handy hygiene compliance: Knowledge is there, tools are there, simply people forget to disinfect their hands.
- Opinion poll: What would increase the compliance? Nr. 1: More dispensers. Nr. 2: More monitoring and feedback.
- Bed Bugs killed by a fogger with Permethrin and Peroxide. Not Silo Busters but Bug Busters.
- How often does the laboratory ask you what you really want? Yet, the laboratory has to be a partner, an ally.
- Reservoir of resistant pathogens is growing.
- Stewardship must be a coordinated program.
- Rapid identification combined with treatment might solve the problem.
- “Darwinopoly” – survival of the fittest (Bacteria have survived for around 1,2 billion years)
- Innovation is always related to praxis somehow
- Expert group at Semmelweis’ times: “We think that the theory of chlorine washing is outdated”
- If you want to break a silo – don’t forget emotions!
- In the US due to legal praxis it is not “patient as partner” anymore, it has turned into “patient as enemy”. We have to make patients partners again.
- Patients versus doctors: There are rights and duties on both sides
- Hygiene is a legal obligation!
- Never forget: Also staff members can be infected during an outbreak!
- How to act: Narrow window – wide impact
- We learned to share – that increases the value (silo busting?!)
- Do we have enough (clean) hands for our patients?
- Infection control is like Sisyphus work
- As an infection control person, you might feel like an elephant in a closet. But with the right mind set, dedicated teams and an open mind of political bodies – problems can be solved.
Semmelweis was the first health care activist!
Let us all become health care activists!!
Bernhard Küenburg
