We spoke to Jincy Jerry, Assistant Director of Nursing and IPC at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital, Dublin, Ireland about how she has implemented the Ultrasound Infection Prevention Toolkit.
Can you introduce yourself?
My name is Jincy Jerry, I am the Assistant Director of Nursing and IPC at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital, Dublin, Ireland.
What is the Ultrasound Infection Prevention Toolkit?
The Infection Prevention Toolkit is designed by a group of different decontamination specialists from the UK and Ireland.
It is an audit tool that helps either decontamination leads or infection control professionals, or any hospital or organization to follow the steps to carry out an appropriate audit processes.
It contains a location profile where the departments will be able to identify where the ultrasound probes are situated, what policies are in place, if there is there an appropriate SOP in place, and ask the probing questions; is the probe cleaned properly? Is the decontamination process adequate? Is the probe safe to reuse on the next patient?
So, it enables the healthcare professional to identify the gaps in the system in the decontamination process. It also enables the team to develop SOPs, create algorithms for different departments within the hospital and provide guidance to do a risk analysis and risk development so to mitigate the risk that they are experiencing at that time.
Are you using the Ultrasound Infection Prevention Toolkit?
We introduced the IP toolkit last year. So, it is a year since we are using it.
We found it really informative. It gave us clear guidance on how to put the appropriate decontamination process in place. I initiated the process along with our Decontamination Lead and received really good support from our hospital management.
The audit highlighted the inconsistencies in the decontamination process that we experienced. Until we carried out this audit, we didn’t know what was happening.
As more and more point-of-care ultrasound is being used in every department, not just in radiology or diagnostic intervention, or cardiology. Now it is being used in every department as a diagnostic tool. Many of our consulting colleagues usually say that they are using this instead of a stethoscope.
The use of ultrasound probes has increased dramatically and it's our key responsibility to ensure patient safety after each use.
We have used the IP toolkit; it has helped improved our compliance in decontamination reprocessing. It helped us to create the risk register and a standard SOP for the organization.
You can find out more about the Infection Prevention Toolkit here:
