Experts Canvass Painstaking Effort to Tackle Hospital-associated Infections
Medical experts have canvassed for conscientious efforts to address the burden of Healthcare-Associated Infections in the country.
They said this at the Participatory Approach to Learning in Systems conference held in Abuja in collaboration with the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, NCDC, and the Robert Koch Institute.
The conference was themed ‘PALS: Catalyzing the power of people for sustainable Infection Prevention and Control improvement in health facilities’.
The national team IPC lead, NICADE-IPC project, and national coordinator of IPC at the NCDC, Dr Tochi Okwor, while speaking, said out of 100 patients hospitalised, seven will be infected with avoidable HAIs.
He said the risk of HAIs is up to 20 times higher in low- and middle-income countries such as Nigeria, adding that the more ill and fragile patients get, the higher the risk of HAIs and their potentially deadly consequences.
She said, “Furthermore, deaths are increased two to threefold when these infections are resistant to antimicrobials.
“Patients suffering from other non-communicable conditions and seeking care in hospitals, such as accident victims, premature babies, and surgical patients or even healthy individuals accessing preventive services, such as vaccination also find themselves at the risk of being infected with these avoidable HAIs.
“Healthcare facilities have often been the entry point for outbreaks or become amplifiers of pathogen transmission, with subsequent spread of outbreaks to the community.”
She, however, said IPC is a proven solution that can prevent most harm and incalculable suffering and costs to people as well as the health system.
According to her, evidence shows that up to 70 per cent of HAIs can be prevented by scaling up an array of effective IPC interventions.
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“Investing in IPC is therefore one of the most effective and cost-saving interventions available,” she added.
Also, a Research Associate and NiCaDe-IPC project co-lead from the Center of International Health Protection at the Robert Koch Institute, in Germany, Dr Flora Haderer, said the conference will enhance infection prevention and control in Nigerian health facilities.
She said, “We come together today to present the PALS, share experiences of implementing PALS, exchange insights, and explore the promising avenues that lie ahead.
“The collaboration of NCDC and RKI in the effort to improve IPC in Nigerian health facilities goes back to 2017 when a team of German and Nigerian public health experts, IPC practitioners, clinicians, and educationalists came together to innovate a new approach for IPC training and piloted this training on participatory quality development in a few hospitals in Lagos.
“The results of this pilot were so successful that NCDC decided to plan for a scale-up, and together we started the NiCaDe IPC project. Since then, the interdisciplinary NiCaDe IPC team, of which I am proud to be a member, together with Nigerian public health practitioners has worked to further develop this transformative approach.”
On his part, the NCDC DG, Dr Ifedayo Adetifa said there is a need for improved IPC knowledge and overall organisational development in our healthcare system.
He said, “The collaboration between the RKI and NCDC in this regard has continued and promises to grow. As part of the collaboration to ensure sustainability, a new cohort has begun to receive training as multiplicators.
“As the name suggests, this category of trained PALS experts will function as reservoirs to expand and multiply PALS in healthcare facilities across the country. Their training focuses on identifying new ways in which PALS can be applied in various settings to produce desired results.
“Already, the NCDC is working to integrate the PALS approach into the national IPC programme. This will make the application of PALS part of routine IPC practice.”
