Infection control awards

With entries from infection control teams from all over the world, with each hospital facing different challenges and with widely differing resources at their disposal, the Oxoid Infection Control Team of the Year Awards judges focussed their attention on those teams who had demonstrated that they have really made a difference to standards of infection control within their own hospitals and who are setting examples for others to follow.

1st: Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust, UK

The judges were unanimous in their decision to award the £5,000 first prize in the 2006/2007 Oxoid Infection Control Team of the Year Awards to the team at the Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust.

Key initiatives had also achieved success. MRSA bacteraemia rates fell, multi-faceted initiatives to reduce Clostridium difficile associated diarrhoea (CDAD) were put in place (including a root-cause analysis of every case of CDAD) and practice improvements throughout the Trust have reduced to zero cases of Acinetobacter baumannii colonisation/ infection since August 2006. In summary one judge commented “Within a reasonably sized hospital, with a team that is not over resourced, the infection control team at the Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust are doing what we should all be doing and they are doing it well.”

2nd: Cho Ray Hospital, Vietnam The judges were very impressed by the volume of work undertaken and the successes achieved by this small infection control team at the 1705-bed, Cho Ray Hospital. The team had produced many educational aids and trained over 4,000 people in basic infection control practice during 2006, at their own and surrounding hospitals. Their intervention programmes, modified procedures and new reporting systems showed that hospital-acquired infections had fallen significantly and, despite an increasing incidence of patients with blood-borne infections, exposure to these infections among staff had been greatly reduced. The team will receive a prize of £1,000 and a framed certificate.

3rd: Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust, UK and Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, Nigeria Separating two worthy winners was an impossible task for the judges when it came to awarding 3rd prize and so they decided to make the award jointly to two hospitals, each of whom will receive £250 and a framed certificate.

The entry from the team in Southampton demonstrated that, across four hospital sites, they had many infection control challenges. The judges were impressed by the team’s “solid, hot-spot strategy and target indicators”. The judges commented that the team at the Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital in Nigeria had “a holistic approach to infection control and had done a wonderful job with limited resources”.

Their reducing rates of hospitalacquired infection and procedures for dealing with hospital waste were cited as particular areas of success.