Sanne Peters1
1Senior Research Fellow in Implementation Science
Biography:
Dr. Sanne Peters is a Senior Research Fellow in Implementation Science.
She started her research career in Melbourne, at the Royal Children’s Hospital Education Institute in 2013. It was there that she was first able to pursue her interest in the health and education nexus. Sanne’s PhD research explored strategies aimed at improving knowledge translation in the training of general practitioners at the University of Leuven, in Belgium. During her postdoctoral work in Belgium and as Chair of the Implementation Working Group of the Guidelines International Network, Sanne has been facilitating bottom-up behaviour change processes that aim to increase the uptake of evidence-based clinical guidelines into practice.
At the University of Melbourne, Sanne works as implementation scientist on multiple projects ranging from paediatric oncofertility to infection prevention and control in residential aged care. Her work aims to address the barriers that slow or halt the uptake of proven health interventions and to identify the most effective ways to support improvements in healthcare practice.
Abstract:
Clearly written guidelines and local policies with specific and actionable statements might increase the likelihood that staff members are able to act upon it. It was our expectation that the level of specificity in such documents would be higher, i.e. more detailed, at the organisational level compared with the national level, given that local documents are developed for a specific context and workforce. We aimed to compare infection prevention and control (IPC) statements and their specificity in a national guideline with local residential aged care policies and procedures. We conducted a document analysis informed by the Action, Actor, Context, Target and Time (AACTT) framework. The Australian Guidelines for the Prevention and Control of Infection in Healthcare and the local policies and procedures of eight residential aged care providers were investigated. We found that there was some overlap between statements in the national guideline and local policies and procedures, but statements were generally not well specified in these documents. This presentation will discuss how staff and managers can better translate national IPC guidelines into actionable local policies and procedures.