By Healthcare Facilities Today

The Journal of Hospital Infection recently released the guidelines on infection prevention and control for a range of healthcare professionals. They are available online on ScienceDirect and on the journal’s website. 

According to an article on the Infection Control Today website, the guidelines were commissioned by the UK Department of Health and have been developed after a review of all the available scientific evidence. They update and supersede the previous guidelines on this topic published in 2007.

“It is difficult to stop the rise of increasingly resistant organisms. What we can do however is prevent them spreading between patients and becoming established among the resident microbial flora- the bacterial population in our hospitals. Infection prevention and control has never been more important than it is now,” microbiologist Dr. Jenny Child, editor in chief of the Journal of Hospital Infection, said in the article.

The first of the seven key action points outlined in the UK 5-year Antimicrobial Resistance Strategy 2013-1018, produced earlier this year by the DoH and DEFRA, is about improving infection prevention and control.

In her forward to the guidelines, which will accompany the January 2014 printed issue of the Journal of Hospital Infection, professor Dame Sally Davies, NHS England’s chief medical officer, said, “In March 2013, my annual report on infection and the rise of antimicrobial resistance highlighted the need for healthcare professionals to understand and put into practice the principles of infection prevention and control in order to improve patient outcomes. These updated guidelines underpin and provide the knowledge base to inform this understanding.” 

Read the article.