Roles and Responsibilities of ICN

Roles and Responsibilities of ICN

The ICN's primary responsibility is to ensure that healthcare professionals follow infection control measures. The ICN acts as a liaison between the HICC and the wards/ICUs to identify and address issues.

Implementing solutions.

1. The Infection Control Nurse is conducts daily infection control rounds and maintains registers and checklists.

2. Infection Control Nurse educates healthcare workers, such as, doctors, and housekeeping staff on avoiding healthcare-associated illnesses and maintaining proper hand hygiene.

3. As an Infection control nurse need to clinical and non-clinical department, you will need to ensure compliance with established SOPs, manuals, policies, and protocols, including hand washing, isolation, IV and vascular access, urinary catheter care, universal precautions, housekeeping, cleaning, disinfection, PPE, biomedical waste and equipment cleaning.

4. Tracks Intensive care unit and OT department and patients’ positive culture cases in the inpatient unit, filling up hospital infection information sheets or surgical site infection sheets, and maintaining daily records.

5. Probable cases of healthcare-associated illnesses and inappropriate antibiotic policy and antibiotic use must be discussed during Hospital infection control meetings.

6. During infection control rounds, they need to use the care bundle checklist to actively monitor for four frequent HAIs:

• CLABSI (Central Line Associated Blood Stream Infection),
• CAUTI (Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infection),
• VAP (Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia),
• SSI (Surgical Site Infection).
• HW (Hand Washing)

7. Conducts on-site audits of infection control measures, including universal precautions such as hand hygiene and PPE use and biomedical waste management.

8. They need to follow the assigned role and responsibility to support the hospital's infection prevention and control objectives.

9. The Infection Control Nurse they reports any illogical antibiotic use to the ICO for discussion in Hospital Infection Control meetings.

10. Infection Control nurses do swab OT and ICUs for environmental cleaning and disinfection.

11. The need to collect hand swabs, nose swabs, and fingertip cultures to guarantee good hand hygiene for healthcare workers.

Roles and Responsibilities of the Infection Control Officer (ICO)

1 To supervise the surveillance of healthcare-associated infections (HAI) daily.

2. To supervise the various infection control programs in the OT, ICU, and ER departments.

3. To coordinate with the HICC in short-term planning, the Infection Control Programme in healthcare, and the preparation of Policies.

4. To develop every department SOPs for various Infection Control Practices.

5. To compile and disseminate data on the monitoring of various infection control practices, like the WHO guideline for hand hygiene audit, in-use disinfection testing, environmental microbial surveillance, etc., to the stakeholders.

6. To compile and present data of HAIs like CLBSI, SSI, VAP, CAUTI, hand hygiene audit, disinfection testing, occupational exposure events, environmental testing, etc., in the HICC Meetings.

7. To keep a track of any developing outbreaks of infection in the Hospital. Plan and participate in the appropriate management of an outbreak process.

8. To participate, guide in research activities related to infection control practices, and publish them.

9. Advise on the appropriate use of antibiotics and provide guidelines for the restated antibiotics.

10. To implement appropriate action in case of isolation of a multidrug-resistant organism (MDRO/ Pan drug-resistant bacteria in the laboratory. This information may be received regularly from the hospital bacteriology laboratory or from the clinician.

11. To ensure safe laboratory practices to prevent laboratory-acquired infections among staff.

12. To compile and provide summary reports of the prevalence of resistance, bacteria-wise, syndrome-wise and/or unit-wise.

13. Monitoring sterilization, disinfection, and the environment where necessary