Friday 7 October 2016

A Guide to Infection Control Risk Assessment

An infection control policy is required for any workplace environment regardless of the type of work executed. However, all such policies must cover same sections so that the employer is easily able to eliminate, reduce or take any other steps to manage and arrest the potential infectious situation. Any person with a contagious illness in the vicinity inadvertently put others at risk. This risk assessment will help you control infections in any work settings. Let us understand it further.




The Legislative requirement for infection control management
Within any healthcare or work environment, the infection control management should always aim and strive for a safe working environment for each and everybody involved, directly or indirectly. It is the duty of the employer to ensure proper management of health, safety and welfare of all involved. This included reporting of injuries and all kinds of health risks and occurrences, expanding even to food.

The policy
The best way to control an infection is by developing a powerful and effective infection policy. It should be crafted keeping the work activities of the work environment in mind along with considering personnel and all others within the environment. The policy must be practical and realistic enough to make implementation possible. It must not be vague and open to interpretation. Instead, it must be so clear and structured that any personnel will know exactly what is expected of him for the policy’s implementation. The policy must always remain live and must be periodically reviewed and changes incorporated if any new risk gets introduced in the workplace. Risks can come from personnel or even visitors who may come in with an infectious disease maybe because of any local outbreak or any epidemic or pandemic outbreak at international level. The policy must make it mandatory to assess infection control risks using the prescribed means.