Challenges in Staffing Infection Prevention and Control Roles in Pediatric Hospitals

A new paper published on Oct. 17 in the American Journal of Infection Control (AJIC) highlights the efforts at a major children’s hospital to assess and fulfill its staffing needs for infection prevention and control, detailing the challenges of allocating sufficient resources to this important role.

A press release on the paper said, “Infection preventionists (IPs) at Boston Children’s Hospital found that conventional methods for calculating the number of staff for these roles do not accurately reflect the current needs of healthcare systems or the specific needs of a pediatric patient population, and that a new approach is required to ensure patient safety.”

Further, “While infection prevention is widely regarded as critical for hospitals and other healthcare facilities, properly staffing these roles has long been a challenge, in part because IPs are expected to take on many responsibilities that are not directly associated with infection prevention and control. In a survey conducted by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) in 2020, just 14% of respondents said that their work was fully focused on infection prevention activities. Most respondents were also expected to perform quality improvement, education, and regulatory compliance work in addition to their infection prevention responsibilities.”

The standard approach to calculating IP staffing needs is based on the number of inpatient beds at a hospital. Yet, this method does not take into consideration certain trends in healthcare such as increased outpatient procedures, shorter durations of hospital stays, and more focus on ambulatory services. The need for IPs is likely to be significantly higher than an inpatient-bed-only calculation suggests.

“In their new paper, IPs described a detailed assessment of the infection prevention and control needs at Boston Children’s Hospital, which includes more than 40 different clinical departments and handles more than 47,000 emergency department visits and more than 690,000 ambulatory visits annually, based on data for fiscal year 2021,” the release added. “At the time, hospital IPs were responsible for supporting the main hospital campus, four satellite campuses, four doctor’s offices, and a community health center. The needs assessment focused on time devoted to on-site and off-site responsibilities, as well as an evaluation of ambulatory location complexity.”