Regulations requiring more attention on infection prevention and an expanded role for nursing home infection preventionists were fortuitous, coming as they did just ahead of the COVID pandemic.
But a General Accounting Office report has since recommended strengthening oversight of IPs after an alarming increase in infections, including tuberculosis and meningococcal disease.
“Every healthcare institution that has any type of patient should have infection prevention coverage,” Emory Healthcare Infection Prevention Manager Jill Holdsworth told McKnight’s Long-Term Care News.
And while that has been true for some time, many nursing home IPs are just beginning to get their sea legs.
“When I’d call someone at a nursing home and tried to find whoever’s in charge of infection prevention, I’d get somebody different each time I called,” Holdsworth said.
In the waning days of the initial IP mandate, Holdsworth penned a first-person account, “I’m not just an infection preventionist.” It chronicled the resistance to and misunderstanding of the IP role.
The self-described “IP who doesn’t have an RN or a BSN” also has filled roles as exercise physiologist, an emergency medical technician, certified sterile processing technician and is board certified in infection control and epidemiology.
Today, long-term care nurses are warming up to IPs, who, like Holdsworth, can have a variety of backgrounds..
“I can’t overstate how vital the role of IPs is in interdisciplinary care,” said Saskia Popescu, an internationally recognized infectious disease epidemiologist and global health security leader with expertise in outbreak response and bio-resilience.
“It’s helpful that CMS has been working with CDC to provide more evidence-based practice rules and guidance for infection prevention,” added Deborah Burdsall, PhD, a board member of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. “We’re witnessing a reimagining of infection prevention and long-term care.”
Holdsworth and Burdsall advocate for facilitating career ladders for eager nursing home staff seeking IP roles.
