Kelly Cawcutt, MD, MS

The role of infection prevention teams in health care organizations is critical but often underrecognized when things are going well. However, in the setting of outbreaks, these teams comprise the backbone of expertise relied on to buoy us forward safely.

In a study shared at the SHEA Spring Conference this week, the granular impact of COVID-19 on infection prevention teams has garnered significant interests. Alsuhaibani and colleagues assessed the number of calls received by the infection prevention team at University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019, the median number of calls per month was 71 (range 50 to 119). During the COVID-19 pandemic, this increased to a media of 368 (range 149 to 829), representing a 500% increase in call burden. The median number of minutes per call was 10 (range 2 to 270 minutes), which by this author’s calculations, suggests that over a 30-day period, more than 2 hours per day were required to simply answer phones.

This increased burden may not come with a generalizable increased resource supply, yet it carries profound impact when considered with the increased workload related to prevention of nosocomial spread of COVID-19, dealing with limited resources and still with the prior heavy lift of preventing traditional health care-associated infections. Diversion of efforts toward phone calls, increased overall work burden and the professional and personal impact of this pandemic require us to consider how to proactively plan to support these critical infection prevention teams, especially during surging workloads, and to consider the impact of burnout within our organizations and on health care as a whole if we fail to do so. The increased workload, even of phone calls alone, is not sustainable. Recognition is not enough. We must move toward innovative solutions and future preparedness planning to support our outbreak backbone — the infection prevention team.