Nurse appointed to tackle infections at Conquest

Tina Lloyd, who started working for the Trust six years ago as a trainee infection control nurse, has been appointed as Lead for Infection Control.

She also takes on a deputy director role of Infection Prevention and Control '“ under temporary directors Cathy Stone and David Scott - ensuring that an equal service is provided on both sites.

Tina said, "The department has been reconfigured and we now have one infection control team across both sites '“ Eastbourne and Hastings both now have equal provision of infection control nurses, including a temporary project nurse to help implement Saving Lives across the Trust."

Saving Lives is a major element of Tina's new role '“ the Department of Health initiative sets out a programme to reduce healthcare acquired infections including MRSA.

The programme includes nine challenges where the Trust has to assess its own performance '“ including training and education for staff and the implementation of Trust wide policies for infection control.

Tina said, "By assessing our performance against the challenges we can see what we are doing well at, and where we can improve. Audits are being implemented thorough the organisation to raise standards consistently in a number of High Impact Interventions that put patients most at risk of infection (for example urinary catheter care, hand hygiene and intravenous infusion).

The infection control link nurses will use the audit tools (known as care bundles) in clinical areas to observe practice and pick up anything that could be improved on, giving immediate feedback to staff.

Tina said, "We want to see best practice embedded in wards throughout the Trust and that's what Saving Lives is all about. A high impact team has been formed to drive this initiative forward."

The Chief Executive and the Trust Board are offering their full support to this important initiative and have appointed Clinical Directors responsible for ensuring each directorate meets it's targets for improvement.

The National Patient Safety Association have recently introduced a new tool which means that every MRSA bacteraemia is investigated in detail '“ from the staff involved in the patients' care to the possible sources of the bacteraemia and how it can be prevented in the future '“ the idea being to create action plans within each directorate to tackle MRSA.

In August, Chief Executive Kim Hodgson invited the Department of Health to visit the Trust in order to help further reduce instances of MRSA '“ the improvement team noted that all the systems were in place and that the main challenge, together with two thirds of Trusts across the country, was to engage staff '“ a key focus for Tina.