Public had become "complacent" about basic hygiene prior to coronavirus lockdown says city's infection control experts

The Leeds Community Health Care NHS Trust has a dedicated Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) team, which, for years has been working to reduce the number of healthcare associated infections (HCAIs) and the prevention of avoidable infections both in the community and in the trust's own buildings.

The nature of its work, usually planning infection control in settings such as community nursing, childrens services and specialist services such as dental, podiatry and MSK, changed in February as coronavirus began to spread around the world.

While a lot of the team's previous work centred around educating people about hygiene practices that have been tried and tested for years, it added people had "become complacent" and for the last few months the focus of the team has been to remind people of the priorities around embedding effective hand hygiene as well as providing equipment and providing a reactive service to the staff in LCH,

A spokesperson said: "Covid-19 has really highlighted the importance around the key priorities for IPC elements such as hand hygiene, cleanliness and standard precautions that we continuously educate people about and did do for many years prior to the pandemic.

"Covid-19 has reminded the population about how easy something can spread, even though annually we see outbreaks of Influenza and Norovirus there can be a degree of complacency amongst the general population and Covid has been a stark reminder about how important basic principles such as hand hygiene and cough etiquette really are."

As lockdown starts to ease, the focus of the team's work is to start looking at how to pre-empt problems and where they might occur.

A spokesperson added: "A large proportion of our work is devoted to Covid-19, continuing with prevention strategies previously embedded around reducing the spread of infection as well as following national guidance updates. The team work widely with internal LCH services as well as external partners and providers of care such as hospices, learning disability providers and engagement with vulnerable groups and trying to pre-empt where potential problems may occur.

"In Leeds we already had an existing strong foundation with partners such as Leeds City Council and NHS Leeds that provided a unique way of working with care homes and other providers, and the pandemic has helped us built upon that partnership in a very positive way. We will continue to strengthen this over the time to come, ensuring ultimately that the people of Leeds are provided with outstanding safe quality care."

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Thank you Laura Collins