Infection prevention in nursing homes and hospitals differs much more than you can imagine. While in both settings, there is a focus on preventing infections; there are unique challenges and considerations in nursing homes and sheltered housing that you won’t find in hospitals at all!

Firstly, nursing homes and sheltered housing have a different population diversity than hospitals. This diversity presents a challenge in developing infection prevention protocols that cater to the specific needs of each resident.

The population is more sensitive to weather, food, technology, and personnel changes. Secondly, nursing homes and sheltered housing have a communal living environment, increasing the risk of infection transmission between residents. This setting also means that staff must be vigilant in enforcing infection prevention measures, such as hand hygiene, use of personal protective equipment, and environmental cleaning.

The residents usually have a higher sensitivity to infection and lower biological compensation capabilities. This means a “regular” hospital risk can be a significant challenge in an elderly care environment.

Thirdly, nursing homes and sheltered housing often have fewer resources than hospitals, such as fewer staff, limited supplies of personal protective equipment, and less access to testing and diagnostic tools. This can make infection prevention more challenging, and facilities may need to be creative in finding solutions to these resource limitations.

For example, they may have a lower threshold for initiating outbreak management measures, such as isolating residents, restricting visitors, and increasing cleaning and disinfection protocols.

This is just there tip of the iceberg.

While the elderly population is rapidly growing, assistive living is constantly trying to close the gaps as we learned during the pandemic. Enforcing and empowering the staff with new technologies and training converting regular community living to a hospital-like tech environment.

Many facilities on the east coast, have started to utilize not only Soapy Pro, intelligent hand hygiene stations but also enjoy the vast capabilities of Soapy Wisdom, an innovative cloud platform that utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms to identify patterns and trends in hand hygiene compliance.

This information can be used to identify areas where additional training or reinforcement is needed.

It also helps to develop strategies for improving overall compliance rates. Empowering and elevating end users using data and personal feedback.

Infection prevention can be standardized and still be fun.

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