The Infection Prevention and Control Programs in Australia

Although there is no standardized practice for the hospital infection prevention and control programs in Australia or in international settings, some activities that have been agreed on by practitioners for promoting success in preventing and controlling nosocomial infections should be identified.

Certain essential features should be considered as influencing the high-quality clinical governance related to the efficient implementation of Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) programs. These features are the active involvement of the Chief Executive Officer, the focus on multi-level buy-in, development of preventive policies, the design of epidemiological experts’ networking, surveillance, and the focus on monitoring. The identified features can help in providing the required resources for infection and control practitioners and in fixing problems associated with infection outbreaks.

Successful infection prevention programs also require access to an accredited laboratory and efficient pharmacy systems and protocols which would enable the infection control practitioners to provide prompts and meaningful feedback to groups of clinicians (Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare 2009). In addition, effective surveillance, good reporting systems, ongoing education on evidence-based infection prevention practices, antimicrobial stewardship, and the promotion of the IPC program’s reasonable authority, support, and autonomy would contribute to the program’s effective work.

The success of IPC programs can be evaluated with references to completing the annual objectives measured according to the annual reports and surveillance reviews. These measures would help in stating benchmarks to compare the currently collected data with the previous results. Furthermore, effective surveillance would help in detecting and recognizing any potential outbreaks.