Alexandra Peters on avoiding failure in healthcare hygiene (Switzerland)

On the podcast is Alexandra Peters.

Alexandra Peters is part of the University Hospitals of Geneva and World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre. It leads research and educational program development for Clean Hospitals, a global network dedicated to making hospitals safer through improved environmental hygiene. The group aims to conduct and support academic research, promote interdisciplinary, change how healthcare institutions view environmental hygiene, and raise standards worldwide.

Alexandra’s background in health security and biological security and her current work focuses on infection prevention and control. Specifically, she is working in healthcare environmental hygiene and hand hygiene. She is passionate about infection prevention, security, human behavior, and teaching. Her goals are to champion patient safety and improve public health through awareness-raising and transdisciplinary collaboration. 

 

A few key takeaways: 

On resource alignment

...in Europe, generally, nurses are overworked. During the pandemic, they're exhausted, and the people are clapping for them at the same time that some European hospitals are cutting budgets for staff.

On culture in healthcare settings

Culture may be socially constructed, but that doesn’t make its effect any less real, and it needs to be taken into consideration with any health intervention.

On finances in hospitals 

And so, with the way that budgets work within hospitals, it's easy to say we need x million dollars to buy a da Vinci robot, and here's how much money we're getting back from every operation. But how do we quantify money that's not spent? You know, how do we identify a pandemic that's been averted? And what budgets are that coming out of, and how do we prove that we're taking care of our cleaners better, or that we're using products based on scientific best practices and the knowledge we have today?  How do we prove that that's the reason why your hospital saved 40 million this year. And so that's sort of the big thing that we're also trying to work on.

 Connect with us on Twitter: 

Dr. Marco Bo Hansen @marcobohansenClean Hospitals@Clean_Hospitals