Single rooms, sinks reduce infection
Infection Control Practitioner Edwige De Souza, left, and Clinical Project Manager Marilyn Bellows review drawings of the new healthcare complex. The design boasts the highest average of single patient rooms in the province.
Healthcare-associated infections are by far today one of the most common complications affecting hospitalized patients.
“Currently, around one in nine patients contract a hospital-acquired infection during their hospital stay,” says NHS infection control practitioner Edwige De Souza.
While healthcare professionals do their best to follow guidelines for effective hand washing, another effective means to prevent the spread of infection is to design an environment of care in which patient-related activities can be performed safely, effectively and efficiently.
Building a new healthcare facility is a unique opportunity to utilize best practices in infection prevention and control to promote the most positive outcome for patients.
The new health complex in St. Catharines has been designed to support a healing environment equipped to protect staff, visitors and patients from infections. The design boasts the highest average of single patient rooms in the province, easy access to hand-washing sinks and alcohol-based hand rubs, among a number of other features.
“With the dawn of our new health complex, we are hoping to significantly reduce the incidence of hospital-acquired infections,” says Edwige. “So if, for example, now one out of nine patients get an hospital infection, we hope to reduce that number to zero.”
Unprecedented number of sinks
The amount of hand-wash sinks in the new facility is unprecedented and has set a new standard for the hospital designers. Doctors and nurses using a patient’s washroom sink will be a thing of the past.
“We had long discussions with our healthcare teams and architects about where and how many hand-wash stations could be installed,” says clinical project manager Marilyn Bellows.
Hand-washing stations for the use of doctors, nurses and staff will be located throughout the facility in directly viewable areas at entries to departments and inpatient rooms and in all treatment areas. In public areas where sinks are not within easy reach, alcohol-based hand rubs will be available. The hand-washing stations are triggered by censors and do not require users to touch them.
The other big change from the aging St. Catharines General Site to the new facility will be the number of patient rooms. Eighty per cent of the patient rooms will be single rooms, allowing staff to easily isolate patients with infections when required.
Currently, hospitals in the province have few single patient rooms. At the SCG Site, most rooms have four beds. In this type of a layout, if one patient acquires an infection, that patient has to be moved to another room and the other three patients in the room have to be temporarily isolated to determine whether they also have an infection.
“This means the fourth bed cannot be used for a new patient until all the other patients in the room are cleared of infection. This can take over a week,” says Edwige. “This translates to one less bed for the hospital to use, increasing patients’ wait times for beds and adding to the nurses’ workload.”
“We hope these improvements will boost staff morale as we move to a healthier work environment and a facility where patients will come to get well,” says Marilyn.
In addition, the facility has been designed to segregate inpatient and outpatient zones to allow for complete isolation in the event of a pandemic or other significant event. This high-tech design enables the hospital to be split in two separate air handling zones.
“In addition to the hand-wash sinks, this is another area where we challenged the architects. This practice has not been utilized before, and they are now using our design to show to other hospitals around the world,”
says Marilyn. «
