Ukrainian Elderly People's Home (UEPH) Collaborates to Tackle Infection Rates

The Ukrainian Elderly People's Home is a 46 bed facility located in Delahey, Victoria. In terms of resident care needs and frailty, residents are on average at the high end of low level care and trending towards high level care.

The above graph shows that based on the care needs/diagnoses of residents under the ACFI scale, UEPH residents are on average at the upper end of low level care.

Approximately 18 months ago, UEPH was invited by PivotWest to join their Infection Control project which is entitled Infection control in RACF: Closing the gap between evidence and practice using the Collaborative methodology. UEPH is one of eight aged care facilities that form part of the project's consortium. This project is funded by the Department of Health and Ageing under the Encouraging Best Practice in Residential Aged Care (EBPRAC) program. The aim of the program is to improve clinical care for residents through the application of evidence-based practice in residential aged care.

Five projects were funded under the EBPRAC program in 2007, the clinical target areas being oral health, pain management, medication management with a focus on PRN management, falls management and nutrition management. In 2009 eight projects were funded in the clinical target areas of wound management, behaviour management, infection control and palliative care.

The project involves staff education, submission of a minimum of two Plan-Do-Study- Act (PDSA) cycles per month and also data submission. UEPH is now well into the project and is up to its 23rd PDSA cycle involving around 15 different strategies and improvements.

The project is led by four staff members at UEPH, three from the direct care staff and one from domestic services. Their role is to come up with ideas, review progress and help guide and communicate with other staff. The team has also increased the amount of information about the project at the home by way of written material and posters.

UEPH has maintained lower than average infection rates for the past six months.

"Over the past six months we have been encouraged by a steady decline in our infection rate and we now sit below the industry average for low care which is a pleasing result because on average our residents are more frail than in most other low care facilities", says Care Manager, Deb D'Costa. Deb stated that staff members participate in the annual Infection Control Competency Test, and as a result of further improvement this year, scored in the top 5% of results. She stated that benchmarking results point towards overall improvement in the infection control area.

UEPH staff have moved into the best practice range for the Infection Control Competency Test.

Another benefit of the project has been the opportunity to attend workshops with other facilities engaged in the wound, palliative care and behaviour management projects. Deb explained that in the beginning she "was very concerned about the time involvement but despite the significant workload involved, the effort has been very worthwhile." Deb suggests to other facilities that if you are given the opportunity to participate in these projects you should seriously consider the benefits.