Telling an Infection Prevention Success Story

By Genevieve Valek

Valek & Co. has been working with Vitalacy for some time now, specifically with a white paper, blog articles, media outreach and media training. Valek & Co. media trained Vitalacy’s CEO Janel Nour-Omid and wrote a case study about St. Mary’s Healthcare System for Children’s success in preventing infections – made possible by the ability of Vitalacy’s electronic hand hygiene technology to monitor duration in a market-leading way.

By gathering and tracking objective data about hand-wash duration and compliance, and then improving team results on these hand hygiene performance measures, the partnership between St. Mary’s and Vitalacy reduced both respiratory infections and other healthcare-acquired infections (HAIs) in St. Mary’s long-term care nursery.

Most children residing in the nursery are medically fragile. Having been born prematurely and transferred from intensive care units, many of these children at this post-acute residential care facility receive ventilation through permanent tracheostomies. A respiratory infection or any other kind of HAI at this stage of an early and vulnerable life can cause significant complications or even death.

St. Mary’s implemented a variety of measures to reduce infections in this nursery unit, which had the highest infection rate in the facility. Installing ultraviolet lights and a new air filtration system reduced infections significantly but not low enough to reach the organization’s goal of zero infections. St. Mary’s re-trained its staff on hand hygiene and used direct observation to monitor compliance to hand antisepsis. However, they found that this was still not enough.

What finally did drive infections down to near zero was improved performance on hand-wash duration by the nursery’s team members, in addition to interventions/ restrictions put in place facility wide due to the COVID pandemic.