Collective efforts, better engagement

He also highlights some of the key implications for healthcare engineers and estates managers in their day-to-day roles, and stresses the importance of interaction and collaboration between estates professionals and their clinical, infection control, nursing, and other hospital counterparts, in both reducing the number of such infections, and creating environments unconducive to their spread.

As humans, we come with baggage: approximately 1014 microbiota1 (which is an awful lot of zeros of organisms that colonise our bodies); around 10 times more than there are cells in our bodies. Most healthcare-associated infections (HCAI) are a result of one or some of these microbiota species going ‘rogue’, and causing infection. It is essential to grasp this in our understanding of HCAIs, since so often we are led to believe that such an infection is due to a ‘superbug’, such as MRSA.

Some HCAIs with organisms derived from our own microbiota may be preventable, but not all are. Every healthcare intervention has the potential to compromise the body’s normal defences in some way. In the case of surgery, incisions may have been made to access deeper tissues. It may be that a medical device is required, for example a urinary catheter, which bypasses the body’s normal defences, and provides an access path for organisms direct to the bladder. However, infection prevention and control policies are adopted by healthcare providers to seek to minimise these risks as far as practicable. Therefore much can be achieved to reduce even infection from our own microbiota.