Infection Control Preparation and Your Intranet

Norovirus and flu season may be winding down but it’s never too late to make sure your employees are well informed on all matters of infection control. A well published infection control presence on your hospitals’ Intranet has a huge impact on the culture and approach everyone in the hospital takes to seriously curb and address infection spread.

So what makes for a terrific infection control page on your intranet? Most importantly the information should be current and have content related to the latest infection issues that are current in the healthcare industry. Second, it is vital that the content be very educational and streamlined to provide employees with all resources they need to first prevent infection spread but also provide information on procedures and instructions on how to handle all potential infection issues.

Additionally, a well published infection control resource on your Intranet helps the infection control department save both time and effort in the following ways:

• By publishing infection control related materials such as plans, manuals, risk assessment manuals, guidelines, hygiene information and others, requests for information can be reduced or eliminated freeing up resources to do other things
• With the infection control Policies and Procedures published on the Intranet, you save time by not having to constantly print and distribute these documents. In addition, you will not have to manually track, review, and sign-off on information related to the policies
• Easily publish departmental contact information with the ability to publish a public list as well as a secure internal contact list containing private contact information that should only be accessible by the department
• Because of the centralized location of the content, the departments employees can quickly and easily access information that otherwise would have required time consuming searching in various locations

You can’t have a good infection control department site on the Intranet without great content. We have observed dozens of our customers and have identified many examples of content that Infection Control published to the Intranet in the past:

• Notifiable diseases listings and rules for when / how to notify public health.
• Infection control plans
  • Bloodborne pathogen exposure
  • Action plans
  • Exposure control plans

• Infection control Policies and Procedures
  • Standard housekeeping procedures
  • Medical waste handling procedures

• Isolation tools and grids (Isolation criteria, transfer rules etc…)
• Infection control manuals
• Infection control risk assessment manuals
• Guidelines (i.e. Isolation Precautions Guidelines, Use of Sharps)
• Current outbreak materials (Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease, West Nile Virus, Norovirus, etc…)
• Seasonal influenza information
• Staff education links and resources
• TB test directions for administration and education sheets
• Hygiene information
• Respiratory etiquette information
• Patient education information
• Multilanguage forms
• FAQs
• Infection control contacts
• Links to internal or external content related to infection control such as CDC website
• Infection control forms
• Infection control news & events

With such a vast library of information, the Infection control department should be one of the more comprehensive content areas of a hospitals Intranet site. Your organization will be much better prepared to prevent and handle infection incidents if the effort is taken to properly publish infection control content.

Looking for other ideas to publish to your hoaspital-wide Intranet? 5 Benefits of Publishing Hospital-Wide Content on Your Intranet