Exchanging knowledge on infection prevention

Introducing the scientific meeting, CSC’s chair, Jimmy Walker emphasised the importance of providing access to further training for decontamination professionals and commented that the CSC aims to bring regular education opportunities to the sector. Both the Annual Scientific Meeting (which took place In Newcastle Upon Tyne), and the Annual Study Day (taking place in Liverpool, 16th October), offer ample opportunities to deepen sector knowledge of best practice, the latest research, guidance, and expert opinion. 

The programme opened with the Kelsey Lecture on: ‘The challenges of decontamination in low resource settings’, by Joost Hopman – a medical director and consultant microbiologist at the Radboud University Medical Centre, in the Netherlands. Joost acts as a consultant for Doctors without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières), Amsterdam, and is an advisory board member of the Infection Control African Network (ICAN). In 2014 and 2015, he was invited to work as an infection prevention and control (IP&C) consultant for the World Health Organization, in the Ebola outbreak response, in Sierra Leone, and this provided him with valuable experience of international outbreaks. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Lagos

Over the years, Joost has gained extensive experience of the challenges around decontamination and infection prevention in countries with lower resources than our own. However, he also emphasised the fact that high resource settings and low resource settings “both need to learn from each other.”