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26 April 2007

Oxoid Infection Control Team of the Year Awards – 2006/2007 Winners Announced

BASINGSTOKE, UK, 26 April 2007 - Oxoid, a world leader in microbiology, is pleased to announce the winners of the 2006/2007 Oxoid Infection Control Team of the Year Awards:

1st Prize:
Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust, UK

2nd Prize:
Cho Ray Hospital, Vietnam

Joint 3rd Prize:
Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust, UK and Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, Nigeria.

With entries from infection control teams from all over the world, with each hospital facing different challenges and with widely differing resources at their disposal, the Oxoid Infection Control Team of the Year Awards judges once more focussed their attention on those teams who had demonstrated that they have really made a difference to standards of infection control within their own hospitals and who are setting examples for others to follow.

1st: Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust, UK
The judges were unanimous in their decision to award the £5,000 first prize in the 2006/2007 Oxoid Infection Control Team of the Year Awards to the team at the Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust. 

All judges were impressed by the team’s “can do” approach and the way in which they had gained involvement from the top down by establishing the Infection Prevention Board as a new sub-group of the Trust Board.  They identified sensible performance indicators and targets, and recognised that the Link Nurse Group was not communicating as efficiently as it could be.  They identified leads and champions to provide more effective routes of communication and share best practice in infection control.  In the words of one of the judges, “these actions ensure that people are answerable at board level on infection control matters and that there are now no loose ends”. 

Key initiatives had also achieved success. MRSA bacteraemia rates fell, multi-faceted initiatives to reduce Clostridium difficile associated diarrhoea (CDAD) were put in place (including a root-cause analysis of every case of CDAD) and practice improvements throughout the Trust have reduced to zero cases of Acinetobacter baumannii colonisation/infection since August 2006.

In summary one judge commented “Within a reasonably sized hospital, with a team that is not over resourced, the infection control team at the Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust are doing what we should all be doing and they are doing it well.” 

2nd: Cho Ray Hospital, Vietnam
The judges were very impressed by the volume of work undertaken and the successes achieved by this small infection control team at the 1705-bed, Cho Ray Hospital.  The team had produced many educational aids and trained over 4,000 people in basic infection control practice during 2006, at their own and surrounding hospitals.  Their intervention programmes, modified procedures and new reporting systems showed that hospital-acquired infections had fallen significantly and, despite an increasing incidence of patients with blood-borne infections, exposure to these infections amongst staff had been greatly reduced. The team will receive a prize of £1,000 and a framed certificate.

3rd: Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust, UK and Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, Nigeria

Separating two worthy winners was an impossible task for the judges when it came to awarding 3rd prize and so they decided to make the award jointly to two hospitals, each of whom will receive £250 and a framed certificate.

The entry from the team in Southampton demonstrated that, across four hospital sites, they had many infection control challenges.  The judges were impressed by the team’s “solid, hot-spot strategy and target indicators”. 

The judges commented that the team at the Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital in Nigeria had “a holistic approach to infection control and had done a wonderful job with limited resources”.  Their reducing rates of hospital-acquired infection and procedures for dealing with hospital waste were cited as particular areas of success.

Oxoid is part of Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (NYSE: TMO), the world leader in serving science.