Summary
Objective and Scope
Our audit had two objectives:
- determine whether the Department of Health has adequate systems to demonstrate successful implementation of the 2008 Alberta Infection Prevention and Control Strategy, and the 2008 Alberta Hand Hygiene Strategy
- determine whether Alberta Health Services (AHS) has adequate systems to demonstrate the success it has in managing health risk in hospitals through the following IPC activities:
- hand hygiene practices
- cleaning, disinfection and sterilization of multiple-use medical devices
- management of patients with antibiotic-resistant organisms (AROs)
Conclusion
There has been a stronger focus on IPC at hospitals over the last several years and AHS, with the department’s support, has introduced important provincial IPC systems that fill critical gaps in all three areas we selected for our audit.
During our hospital visits we did not observe instances where there was an immediate and significant risk to patient safety. Although there have been many improvements in hospital IPC during recent years, we found weaknesses in management systems to ensure implementation of the provincial IPC strategy and the hand hygiene strategy, as well as weaknesses in AHS systems to manage IPC risk within hospitals.
The main theme of our three recommendations to AHS is the following:
- availability of the hospital IPC data has improved
- AHS does not yet have adequate systems at the organizational level to use this data to focus management attention on areas of high risk and evaluate existing hospital IPC practices to support evidence-informed service delivery