Link staff schemes in nursing homes
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Developing an intervention to measure effectiveness of infection prevention and control link staff programmes: preparation for a portfolio project, taking catheter-associated urinary infections as the test case
IRAS ID
172252
Contact name
Tracey Cooper
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 11 months, 31 days
Research summary
Prevention and control of healthcare-associated infection remains a major challenge in the UK, especially in Wales. Frail, older people in nursing homes are highly susceptible to infections and a large study conducted throughout Europe recently established that rates of healthcare-associated infections were more common in Welsh nursing homes than in other European long-term care facilities. Urinary tract infections were the most frequently reported and patients with a urinary catheter in place for more than three days were at greatest risk. Official guidelines to help prevent catheter-associated urinary tract infections are available, but do not appear to be well implemented in nursing homes. One of the problems in this setting is that most care is delivered by unqualified healthcare assistants (HCAs) who have few opportunities for training and whose work is supervised by small numbers of qualified nurses.
We would like to undertake a clinical trial to establish whether implementing the guidelines is effective. Before this can be undertaken, work will be necessary to establish the feasibility and acceptability of implementing the guidelines to nursing home staff, residents and infection prevention and control staff. This will be:
Telephone survey with 15 registered nurses (RNs)
Semi-structured telephone interviews with 15 link staff and 10 clinical nurses
Teleconference with 5 experts in IPC, education and long-term care
3 focus groups with 20 HCAs
Audits of catheter-care performed by HCAs. This will be undertaken by the qualified nurses who will receive training from infection prevention and control specialist staff.• study outcomes and impact
The study outcome will be the generation of data to inform the development of an intervention to improve the care of urinary catheters and prevent catheter-associated urinary infections in nursing home residents that can be tested in a clinical trial. We may submit the developmental study findings to a scientific journal.REC name
Wales REC 4
REC reference
15/WA/0125
Date of REC Opinion
2 Apr 2015
REC opinion
Unfavourable Opinion