February 3, 2011
School of Medicine, Kochi
The Department of Infection Control and Microbiology at the Amrita School of Medicine hosted a two-day national workshop on Infection Control, Antibiotic Therapy and Hospital Epidemiology during January 28-29, 2011.
The workshop was conducted at Amrita’s Health Sciences campus in association with the Society of Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA) and Quality Council of India (QCI).
In addition to faculty and students from the Health Sciences campus, 300 other delegates from all around the country participated.
The conference focused on creating awareness and providing up-to-date knowledge on hospital infection control procedures. It highlighted the importance of development of curriculum for patient safety and design of tools for policy and assessment.
Dr. B. K. Rana, Deputy Director, NABH, QCI, inaugurated the conference.
“Hospital acquired infections are more difficult to treat as the organisms that cause such infections cannot be killed by routine antibiotics,” he stated. “However, such infections can be easily prevented by following simple routine procedures such as washing hands and using antibiotics judiciously.
Dr. Prem Nair, Medical Director of the campus, in his talk pointed out that hospital acquired infections are an important cause of mortality and morbidity in the current day scenario and declared that universities must have comprehensive infectious disease prevention programs to support infection control activities.
Dr. Sanjeev Singh, Medical Superintendent and the organizing secretary of the workshop, emphasized the importance of such workshops in bringing awareness among health care workers, and called for formulation of concrete national policies on infection control, which could be implemented uniformly across all hospitals.
Invited international and national experts viz. Dr. Ling Moi Lin, Director – Infection Control, Singapore General Hospital; Dr. Linus Ndwega, CDC, Kenya; Dr. Geetha Mehta, Head – Patient Safety, WHO, SEARO shared their experiences, suggesting preventive measures to help reduce hospital acquired infections.
Other experts conducted sessions on common hospital acquired infections including infections of the urinary tract, respiratory tract, blood stream, surgical site, ventilator-associated pneumonia and antibiotic therapy.
All speakers emphasized one common thing – good hand hygiene techniques. A few months ago, this Amrita campus had observed handwashing week. Spearheaded by the infection control team, this campaign was conducted during October 11-15, 2010.
