Dr. Lisa Casanova, an assistant professor of Environmental Health at the School of Public Health at Georgia State University, will join a team of researchers at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology in a project designed to discover new methods to protect patients and health care workers from highly infectious diseases.
The work is being funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which awarded a $2.2 million grant to Emory as the lead institution in the creation of the grant, creating the Prevention Epicenter of Emory and Atlanta Consortium Hospitals or PEACH.
PEACH brings together a team of nurses, doctors, environmental psychologists, architectural researchers, human factor psychologists, microbiologists and health care epidemiologists to seek new strategies to reduce the spread of existing dangerous germs, including those resistant to many antibiotics, and new problems like Ebola virus disease.
Dr. Casanova will work with other investigators to assess the transfer of a marker for Ebola and other pathogens when removing personal protective equipment (PPE) and look at steps in the process where errors could occur. The group will visit the five state-designated Ebola treatment centers and work with healthcare workers at those sites to assess opportunities to improve safety for healthcare workers. (The PhD. Emory leads on this effort are Colleen Kraft, MD; Susan Ray, MD; and Andi Shane, MD.)
“We know that hospital-acquired infections are a serious public health problem for patients in the hospital but healthcare professionals are also at risk for getting infections while doing their jobs,” Casanova said. “Our research is focused on a crucial need in public health preparedness – the need to protect our health care workforce from occupational infection.”
PEACH investigators will also focus on two other projects:
- Emory investigators and Georgia Tech researchers will study how the physical environment can make it safer for healthcare workers to don (put on) and doff (take off) PPE required for working with patients infected by Ebola virus disease and other pathogens with transmission mechanisms similar to Ebola.
- Emory researchers will install a new electronic hand hygiene monitoring system at two of its hospitals to look at ways to improve hand hygiene, long considered the cornerstone of preventing infections in hospitalized patients. The system will be used to compare the effectiveness of different methods of providing feedback to health care workers on hand hygiene compliance.
CDC has tasked the Prevention Epicenters members with developing cutting-edge science that is needed to stay ahead of the germs, for both the patients and health care providers.
“To help protect Americans from infections spread in hospitals, CDC supports the Prevention Epicenter program to look for better ways to stop these preventable infections,” said CDC Director Tom Frieden, MD, MPH.
The five other newly added academic centers that will identify infectious disease-related innovations from 2015 to 2018 are:
- The Johns Hopkins University
- University of Illinois, Chicago
- University of Iowa
- University of Maryland, Baltimore
- University of Utah
CDC’s existing Prevention Epicenters are at the following institutions: Cook County Health & Hospital System and Rush University; Duke University; Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and University of California, Irvine; University of Pennsylvania and Washington University.
Read more about Dr. Casanova's research on Ebola and environmental health here.