Pat Cattini (Matron / Lead Specialist Nurse Infection Prevention and Control, Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust) and I recently teamed up to present a webinar entitled: ‘Introduction to the identification and management of carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE)’. You can download our slides here, and here’s the recording:
The webinar covered the following ground:
- Why the fuss?
- What are CRE?
- Who do we screen?
- How do we screen?
- What happens if someone is positive?
- Key questions
CRE represent a combination of anitibiotic resistance, mortality and potential for rapid spread, so we need to be proactive in our approach to the detection and management of carriers. We simply can’t afford for CRE to become established in the same way that MRSA did, so now is the time of opportunity to develop the most effective prevention strategy. The recently published Public Health England Toolkit is useful, but it’s a set of tools to help construct a local policy, not a one-size-fits-all CRE policy. We hope that this webinar will assit you in developing your local CRE policies and plans.
Oh, and look out for the Premiere of ‘ISOLATION: THE ENEMY OF CRE’ (a Pat Cattini film)…
Reflections on Infection Prevention and Control 
Thanks Jon and Pat for putting this together.
Very informative
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This was a brilliant session to watch, so informative and well put together. I learned an awful lot from it as an infection control nurse and will be able to share the knowledge with my colleagues . Thank you
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It is really an awfully helpful session Thanks
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Hey Jon,
How do you address contaminated anesthesia machines in operating room in UK?
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Dr Kanaan – the answer is probably, frankly, not very much! A few studies have looked at compliance with standard cleaning methods in the OR setting and it seems to be lower than on the wards based on removal of fluorescent markers at least: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22869263. Meanwhile, several studies have identified a real risk of contamination of anaesthesia machines with important pathogens combined with frequent hand contact: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25026624. It’s certainly an issue that we need to address.
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I think like everything in infection control there are a multitude of factors in play here..and like any organism evolution will provide a means to evolve and survive against our means of fighting it.In MRSA it was antibiotic use and no doubt cleaning properly helps reduce environmental contamination and therefore spread…however it is also about the global population and exposure to different antibiotic management policies by different countries…or lack thereof..A enclosed environment with lots of hosts who are susceptible is another factor…just as gram negatives find a route to both protect themselve and to replicate as will cpe’e…….Sooooo where now….we need to look at all the routes of transmission..detect where it survives in the environment,which materials commonly found in the environment support proliferation and what it is that allows it to get into the patient.
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Thanks Alyson – agree we need to systematically figure out the transmission routes and focus our interventions accordingly.
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