Primary Care Public Health Nursing Service

Training on Infection Control and Epidemiology in Salt Lake City USA

By

  Ms CHAN Toi-lan, Nursing Officer, Infection Control Branch

   Ms LAM Sui-sum, Registered Nurse, Infection Control Branch

As infection control nurses working in Infection Control Branch of the Centre for Health Protection, we have to participate in surveillance, investigation, and control of infection in hospitals as well as in the community.  Moreover, our major role and responsibility is to conduct and evaluate health education programmes for healthcare workers whenever infection control input is required.  Thus, having appropriate training is essential to equip us as infection control advisors.

The training course that we have attended was organized by The Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) which is a multi-disciplinary voluntary international organization with over 10,000 members.  The major functions of APIC are to influence, support and improve the quality of healthcare through practice and management of infection control as well as application of epidemiology in all health care settings.  The objectives of the training course are to teach trainees to collect, analyze, and interpret surveillance data specific to their practice settings; to assess, design, and evaluate an infection control program; to plan, implement, and evaluate infection control measures; as well as to analyze and interpret microbiology and laboratory data for infection control surveillance.

The training course provided us with the most updated and useful infection control knowledge. Some key concepts included firstly, "to be a successful infection control nurse, clinical experience is very important".  Secondly, "surveillance is a very important element of infection control which is not just data collection and statistics".  Thirdly, "teaching skill is very important to infection control nurse".  The lecturers who had expert knowledge in their specialties shared their working experience in various settings such as acute care, ambulatory care, long term care, critical care, surgical care, behavioral health and pediatrics.  Unfortunately, the program only lasted for three and a half days.  If it had been held in Hong Kong, not only we could have saved the time in travelling, but also more local participants would be benefited by the course.

Overall, participation in this international training program was a very valuable experience to us.  It has broadened our horizon on the scope of infection control practices in the United States.  It also allowed us to share experience on the infection control practices and discuss matters related to the endemic infectious diseases with nurses of other countries.

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