INFECTION PREVENTION
COVID Fatigue and the Infection Preventionist The need for infection preventionists has never been greater. What can hospitals and healthcare systems do to appropriately staff those positions? Linda Dickey, RN, MPH, CIC, FAPIC,
Dickey Consulting LLC, has been an infection preventionist for more than 25 years. In that time, “we’ve never been in a situation where we have either reused or extended the use of personal protective equipment, certainly on the scale that we’ve had to do with COVID,” she said. Dickey is president-elect of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Prevention (APIC). In the past, that reuse or extended use was simply not done as a fundamental tenant of infection prevention. Single-use items were used once and thrown away. Yet reuse and extended use was a situation that nearly every healthcare provider found themselves in amid the early days of the pandemic. “We all realized when we ran into the supply chain issues that it made us think differently about how reserves are handled,” she said. “And it made us think more about the cost of that, because, obviously, there was warehouse space and holding a lot of supplies to consider, versus just-intime inventory. COVID taught us all that we can’t always expect to have something readily available.” Because there were so many interruptions in the supply chain, infection preventionists had to be nimble and work closely with supply chain partners. “We probably worked more closely with them than we ever did before,” Dickey said, whether it 16
July 2021
•
www.repertoiremag.com
