In this episode, Martin talks to Dr Rebecca Crapanzano-Sigafoos (formerly Bartles) who is Executive Director, Center for Research, Practoce and Innovation at the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). We talk about about her work on staffing levels for IPC Teams, beginning with her early work looking at workload and then the recent review and paper on data obtained from the beta version of the APIC Staffing Calculator. It turns out that the vast majority of 390+ participating organisations are understaffed.. What might help however was the finding that hospitals that were better staffed had significantly lower infection rates according to accepted published data. Papers we discuss are found below:

1. Bartles R, Dickson A, Babade O. A systematic approach to quantifying infection prevention staffing and coverage needs. Am J Infect Control 2018;46(5):487-91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2017.11.006.
2. Knighton SC, Engle J, Berkson J, Bartles R. A narrative review of how infection preventionist (IP) staffing and outcome metrics are assessed by health care organizations and factors to consider. Am J Infect Control 2024;52(1):91-106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2023.06.017.
3. Bartles R, Reese S, Gumbar A. Closing the gap on infection prevention staffing recommendations: Results from the beta version of the APIC staffing calculator. Am J Infect Control 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2024.09.004.

In this episode, Martin talks to Cansu Cimen, a researcher at University Hospitals Groningen in the Netherlands, about a recent paper that documents an outbreak and in particular the critical role of next-generation sequencing (NGS) in tracking and controlling the transmission of MDROs via contaminated duodenoscopes.

Focusing on an outbreak linked to ESBL-producing Citrobacter freundii and Klebsiella pneumoniae after endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP), standard culture methods failed to detect contamination. After many negative cultures using established methods, destructive dismantling of the implicated scope revealed contamination on hard-to-clean components, highlighting NGS as an effective tool for identifying pathogen transmission pathways.

Cimen C, Bathoorn E, Loeve AJ, Fliss M, Berends MS, Nagengast WB, et al. Uncovering the spread of drug-resistant bacteria through next-generation sequencing based surveillance: transmission of extended-spectrum beta-lactamase-producing Enterobacterales by a contaminated duodenoscope. Antimicrob Resist Infect Control 2024;13(1):31. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13756-024-01386-5.

Download the paper here

In this episode recorded live at the IPS Conference in Birmingham UK in September 2024, Martin talks to Claire Fitzsimons, Senior Infection Prevention and Control Practitioner at the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service Health and Social Care Trust. We discuss a poster that she presented at the conference that looked as ways of reducing glove use in the ambulance service through a range of improvement methodologies.

A copy of the poster can be found here