Do you have a solid drug diversion monitoring program? If you said yes, that’s great! For those of you that do have a monitoring program, how many of you have participation from the Infection Preventionist (IP) during a suspected case involving injectable medication? Any time there is diversion that involves injectable medications, we need to consider the risk of transmissible infection – transmissible from the diverter to the patient or transmissible from a substitute solution to the patient. The IP’s knowledge of disease transmission and its public health impact, as well as their experience with investigating and reporting communicable diseases and outbreaks, is an asset. They will be aware of unusual infections within the hospital as well as serve as the link to public health authorities in the event of the need for patient notification or the identification of disease transmission due to drug diversion.
If there is a cluster of unusual patient blood cultures, does your IP understand diversion and would they think to reach out to the Diversion Specialist? Reach out to your IP today. Assess their baseline knowledge of diversion, and bring them on board as part of the team.
Click here to read an example of one such case that walks us through the investigation to the source of the infection. 25 patients were infected as a result of drug diversion.
