Tacking the biggest threat to medicinal efficacy

Each year, hundreds of thousands of patients around the world contract infections from hospitals. Meanwhile, an estimated 5 million deaths were estimated to be associated with antimicrobial resistance – with many linked to healthcare-associated infections.

With hospital infection rates and drug-resistant organisms increasing so rapidly, the need to address the way in which healthcare environments are designed, built and operated has never been greater.

Designing a collaborative solution to infection prevention

In March, Sidara partnered with the Healthcare Infection Society at 150 Holborn in London to host a collaborative workshop looking to identify the issues in design and operation that lead to high infection rates and avoidable deaths.

Experts from Currie & Brown, Introba, Perkins&Will were joined by leading specialists in infection prevention, estates and procurement, and worked to strategize targeted interventions to help shape heathier spaces.

With engineering solutions capable of ensuring healthcare-associated infections are avoided entirely, the group’s objective was to identify the barriers to minimizing infection rates and how to overcome them in some of the world’s most complex facilities.

Amongst the solutions identified were

• Embed education, training and processes to ensure better understanding and ensuring guidance is kept relevant

• Design systematically to create intuitive enhanced design standards in new and existing hospitals to minimize the risk of infection

• Significantly improved communication, ensuring everybody involved in design, delivery and ongoing operations of the facility are better aligned

• Streamlined technologically to detect, monitor to enable targeted interventions at the right time

• Enable innovation to react creatively to new outbreaks

Setting a new standard

Following the workshop, the insights generated are to inform the production of a new comprehensive report and scientific paper to be launched at IHEEM in October 2025. The intention is to better equip the whole of industry to collaborate better and improve standards to ensure that healthcare-associated infections no longer have such an impact on public health around the world.

Rachelle McDade, Director of Healthcare Planning at Currie & Brown, commented: “Each year, millions globally contract hospital acquired infections, at a significant cost to life and hospital expenditure. And, antimicrobial resistance continues to grow. Preventing this is an absolute priority and the way we design, construct and operate facilities is now in need of crucial review.“

“Through partnering with the Healthcare Infection Society to host today’s event, we’re looking to help create a roadmap to help everybody involved in healthcare facilities to understand the issues and act on them. By coming together we’re hopeful to create the thinking, solutions and momentum to help tackle one of the of the greatest medical challenges of our time.“