Surfaces - High touch or high risk? | Infection Control Matters

1 months ago

A couple of thoughts - the paper seemed to express a simple concept in a convoluted way that did not work for me. In public health, to assess environmental risk, we use two factors: “hazard (probability of contam) x exposure (prob of someone being exposed to that ) to estimate infection risk from that surface . surface pathogens are not a risk unless patient is exposed to them. In public health a surface is only a high transmission risk if it is contacted by many different people the nurses trolley was contacted many times, but only by the person using the trolley. Each stethoscope was contacted mostly by the physician using it. surfaces may be contacted a lot of times, by the nurse or doctor but it won’t spread infection unless they have contam hands. Also - when comparing a pillow with a bed rail, the chance of someone touching the precise area contaminated by someone else is much higher for the rail? Also when talking about reducing population risk in occupied environments, we find it imposs to make a valid assessment unless we include both fomites and hands - they are interdependent - as part of the “journey of the germ from a source to a recipient”