What Can My Facility Do to Prevent Respiratory Viral HAIs?

Matt Linam, MD, MS, Assistant Professor, Pediatric Infectious Diseases, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, explains a strategy used at his healthcare facility to prevent respiratory viral HAIs in children.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“Trying to figure out how to prevent respiratory viral [healthcare-associated infections] HAIs in children can be a challenge. It’s kind of one of those things where you need to [get] everybody involved and try to engage other staff members. One of the things that we have done at our hospital is, we’ve engaged our unit secretaries.

We require all families and visitors to sign-in at the desk, [and] we’ve used that as an opportunity to provide some quick education for the family, as well as doing a quick health screen to make sure that they’re healthy enough to visit. That seems to have been, for us, a good strategy to get that education about being healthy and [get family and visitors to] performing hand hygiene right at the moment that they’re there, prior to when they actually enter the patient’s room.”