ABSTRACTS
Investing in Infection Control (IC) Technologies Can Reduce Overtime Cost and Staff StressAuthor: Ward Eggli | | Associate Authors: Melissa Balinsky
Introduction Nationwide surveys of Emergency Medical Service (EMS) personnel showed that 12% of workers would not voluntarily respond in a pandemic influenza emergency and 7% would not respond even if required to do so. It also showed that increasing workers’ confidence in the safety of their work environment made responders three times as likely to respond. This makes perceived worker safety important especially for services that have unfilled positions and rely on forced overtime to cover shifts. Ambulance-specific IC solutions were evaluated against set criteria. The goals were to decrease time spent on disinfection by staff and increase workers’ sense of safety. Automating disinfection produced the most positive impact these two outcome measures. Implementation helped reduce responder attrition and hesitancy due to fear (‘Refuse-to-respond’), during the pandemic. Methods In 2016, a microbiology research team at the University of Lethbridge (UofL) was engaged to provide a real -world data regarding pathogens in the ambulance environment. This work located, quantified, and identified what EMS staff were exposed to not due to direct patient interaction. With this knowledge as a premise, we evaluated solutions that mitigated staff exposure to the pathogens shown to be present. Options were evaluated against five (5) criteria: (1) cost, (2) efficacy, (3) ease of use, (4) safety, (5) overall time to disinfect. Results The solutions that best met the five criteria were rolled out to Lethbridge City’s Fire, EMS, Police and City Transit business units (BU) during the pandemic. Those chosen included automated disinfection equipment that is expected to reduce the cost and time to disinfect the ambulance by reducing the reliance on complicated manual disinfection steps and reducing overtime costs to account for absenteeism. Staff reported feeling safer in their environment knowing what they were exposed to and that IC results improved. Conclusion Organizations that implemented the Infection Prevention processes developed through this research did not report significant levels of non-COVID-related sick time, unwillingness, or hesitancy to report to duty, or attrition during the pandemic. Next steps for this research include formal retrospective analysis of absenteeism before and after the implementation of the current best practice process.
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