Yale Daily News

Yale School of Nursing has recently developed a novel infection prevention resource for long-term care facilities.

The resource, known as the “Infection Prevention Compendium For Long-Term Care Facilities,” contains a collection of links to important healthcare information for workers and providers at long-term care facilities. The compendium is divided into four main parts: infection prevention tools & resources for direct care providers, administrators and support staff; international and U.S. infection control resources; a summary of New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM) reports and teaching tools. According to Elana Kieffer, Acting Director of the NYAM Center for Healthy Aging, the inspiration for this project was sparked by one of NYAM’s Senior Scholars-in-Residence, Elaine Larson. 

“[Larson] had a relationship with a company called Saraya that’s based in Japan,” Kieffer said. “They produce our products such as hand sanitizer, and they were really interested in learning more about infection prevention, both in Asia and across the world. So they connected with [Larson] about doing this project. She has done a lot of work with Dr. Portillo at the Yale School of Nursing, and so she kind of put this whole project together.”

Portillo could not be reached for comment at the time of publication.

The resource was developed in collaboration with New York Academy of Medicine, Saraya Co. Ltd. and Best Sanitizers, Inc. The first section is a collection of links to documents and articles focusing on infection prevention for three groups of people at a long-term care facility: direct care providers, administrators and managers and support staff. The next section is focused on continent-wide resources, containing links specific to Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe, as well as general international links. 

The NYAM reports “examine the unique challenges facing the nursing home environment in the ongoing fight against healthcare-associated infections” through an environmental scan of literature focused on infection control in nursing homes. Finally, the teaching tools consist of a set of five Power Points — one each for an administrator, family member, nurse, resident and specialized contract provider — that are designed to “test knowledge and generate an informative discussion that will promote common shared core principles regarding infection prevention and control.”

According to Mario Rubano, Policy Associate for the NYAM Center of Healthy Aging, one of the main goals of the compendium was to make important infection prevention information accessible to medical professionals. 

“If you’re a director of nursing, you do not have time to do all this… for example on the Yale side there were a lot of people pooling all this together,” Rubano said. “[This] is a huge time-saving initiative for nursing home staff, so we did all of the hunting down of this information and put it all into this one location.” 

Rubano worked closely with YSN to gather the information necessary for the compendium, starting in February. Members he collaborated with include Executive Deputy Dean Carmen Portillo, Lecturer in Nursing Nicole Colline, Associate Professor of Nursing Julie Womack, Olivia Buckholz and Virginia Sherrick.

Kieffer hopes that the impact of the compendium can significantly improve nursing home facilities and their staff.

“We saw just how hard so many of the staff worked, and how it can be a thankless job, and this was all before COVID,” Kieffer said. “So once the pandemic hit, you notch that up by 10 times. The impact [of the compendium] is to provide the tools and resources in an easy-to-understand and easily accessible format that can make these staff’s lives a little bit easier. Putting together this compendium was an opportunity to help people feel as if they’re not really alone in this, and that we recognize how challenging it can be to work in a [nursing home] facility.”

NYAM was founded in 1847.