Do you have enough staff in your IP Team? Calculating the staffing requirement for your program

Infection Control Matters

In this episode, Martin talks to Dr Rebecca Crapanzano-Sigafoos (formerly Bartles) who is Executive Director, Center for Research, Practoce and Innovation at the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). We talk about about her work on staffing levels for IPC Teams, beginning with her early work looking at workload and then the recent review and paper on data obtained from the beta version of the APIC Staffing Calculator. It turns out that the vast majority of 390+ participating organisations are understaffed.. What might help however was the finding that hospitals that were better staffed had significantly lower infection rates according to accepted published data. Papers we discuss are found below:

1. Bartles R, Dickson A, Babade O. A systematic approach to quantifying infection prevention staffing and coverage needs. Am J Infect Control 2018;46(5):487-91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2017.11.006.
   
2. Knighton SC, Engle J, Berkson J, Bartles R. A narrative review of how infection preventionist (IP) staffing and outcome metrics are assessed by health care organizations and factors to consider. Am J Infect Control 2024;52(1):91-106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2023.06.017.
   
3. Bartles R, Reese S, Gumbar A. Closing the gap on infection prevention staffing recommendations: Results from the beta version of the APIC staffing calculator. Am J Infect Control 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2024.09.004.