An empty hospital ward with four made beds and drawn curtains.

Department

Infection Control

An infection control nurse spends most of her week collecting data that the hospital already produced, in order to report it back to the hospital. That is the job as most Indian hospitals run it, and it is the reason surveillance is always a month behind the outbreak.

SurveillanceIsolationStewardshipEvidence

Impact and action

Surveillance a month behind.

Device-associated and surgical-site infection rates are compiled by walking the wards with a clipboard, so the picture is always of last month.Surveillance is built from the culture results, the device days and the procedures the hospital already recorded, and the rate is a live view with the source of each figure visible.Falcon
A culture flagging a resistant organism reaches the unit when somebody phones.The result raises an owned alert with an escalation chain, delivered on an audited channel with a delivery log.SentinelRaven

Isolation decided by phone.

Isolation is agreed verbally and the ward, housekeeping and the bed board each learn about it separately.Isolation is a state on the record that the bed board, the ward and the cleaning schedule all read from one place.SentinelGate
Terminal cleaning is requested by phone and confirmed by trust.Cleaning and turnaround run as checklists with owners and due times, and bed-ready status feeds the bed board when the checklist completes.Cadence

Stewardship without a record.

Restricted antimicrobial approval happens over a phone call between two people, and the register of it exists in neither of their systems.Approval runs as a tracked procedure with an owner and a due time, attached to the order it authorises.CadenceForge
Prescribing patterns are reviewed annually because compiling them takes a month.Prescribing is read from the orders themselves, so a pattern is visible while it is still a pattern rather than a history.Falcon

The published record

The size of this problem, measured elsewhere.

A systematic review found health care associated infection affecting 15.5 patients per 100 admitted in developing countries, against 7.6 per 100 in Europe. Source 15 The gap is an operational gap before it is a clinical one: it is made of surveillance that arrives late and control measures that are agreed rather than recorded.

And the simplest control measure, audited.

Across 23 acute care hospitals, 48 percent of the surfaces designated for cleaning between patients had in fact been cleaned. Source 16 A checklist that produces its own evidence is the difference between a policy and a practice.

Read the sources on /research

The tools this committee runs on.

Each row is what the tool does for infection control, with the example the link nurse would recognise.

Tools used in infection control, what each does here, and an example.
Tool	What it does here	Example
Sentinel	Fires the hospital’s own surveillance rules as owned, escalating alerts.	A resistant organism on a ward reaches the committee the same day.
Cadence	Runs stewardship approvals and cleaning checklists as tracked procedures.	A restricted antimicrobial approval is attached to the order it authorised.
Falcon	Reads infection rates and prescribing patterns from the governed data.	Device-associated rates by unit, with the device days behind them visible.
Vigil	Keeps the committee, its minutes, its audits and its actions as standing evidence.	The infection control file is current on the day an assessor arrives.
Westron	Carries culture results from the laboratory system over a governed connection.	An external microbiology result lands against the right patient.
Raven	Delivers alerts and notices on approved templates, with a delivery log.	An isolation notice reaches the ward and housekeeping together.

Interdepartmental