Bennett IPC Transcript

Bennett IPC Transcript

Guidelines for infection control are like multiple volumes of textbooks, but you don't have time for that in the setting of an outbreak, and you have to really pick areas of focus. We had decided that screening at the gate of the healthcare facility was really important because keeping Ebola out of the facility is probably the best way to protect your healthcare workers. Then followed by hand hygiene, use of gloves, adding PPE to that and then waste management. But how do you convey those principles, some of those principles being brand new or those concepts being new, to healthcare workers? The literacy level of healthcare workers varied quite a lot. You weren't going to be able to just like turn over a two hundred page book to a healthcare worker and expect them to pick up the concepts. You were going to have to come up with ways of relaying the information sort of rapidly and on a national scale. I think that project was really where we got our feet wet about like, how does training of trainers really work in Sierra Leone with healthcare workers? How do you actually get out to these remote facilities? What materials really work well? We found picture-based, sort of like conversational training was a better way of reaching healthcare workers at the facility level, sort of on-the-job supervision in training. Then just repeated visits over and over and over again to try to really emphasize some of the really important principles. I think that's really where we--that project was so important for learning those things, and I think we built upon those things when we thought about new projects in Sierra Leone, even during the outbreak and for subsequent trainings. It was definitely not easy. I mean we actually, as part of the training--when our CDC team did the initial training for infection control for that project, we actually included the NGO [non-governmental organization] staff that was going to be supervising because, again, they were not experts in infection control, but they were going to be the ones going out with nurse educators and going out to facilities to do supervisory visits. They needed to understand the same general principles that the Ministry of Health staff were going to be training on. So we actually included a lot of the NGO staff in the trainings.

It was a learning experience. I hope we never have to do that again, stand up a national infection control program in the middle of an outbreak.