Infection Control & Prevention

Foot care clinics occupy a unique space in the Ontario healthcare landscape. They are often small, privately operated, and outside the immediate regulatory sphere of hospital-based IPAC programs, yet they perform procedures that carry real infection transmission risk. Instruments that contact intact and broken skin, wound management in patients with diabetes and vascular disease, and […]

Norovirus is the most common cause of acute gastroenteritis outbreaks in long-term care facilities across Canada, and Ontario is no exception. It spreads faster, contaminates more surfaces, and resists more disinfectants than most healthcare administrators realize until they are managing their first outbreak. A single symptomatic resident can shed billions of viral particles per gram

Respiratory protection is not just a piece of equipment. It is a system, and a system that fails at any point puts the people wearing the equipment at serious risk of exposure to airborne pathogens. Ontario healthcare workers learned this lesson with brutal clarity during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the province’s regulatory expectations around respiratory

Healthcare construction is one of the most underappreciated infection transmission risks in clinical environments. When walls are opened, ceilings disturbed, and air handling systems disrupted, fungal spores, dust particles, and environmental pathogens that have been dormant for years become immediately airborne. Immunocompromised patients in adjacent spaces can develop invasive aspergillosis or other opportunistic infections within

Multi-drug resistant organisms have reshaped infection prevention in congregate living settings in ways that standard cleaning protocols were never designed to address. MRSA and VRE are not simply difficult-to-treat pathogens. They are environmental survivors that colonize residents, persist on surfaces, and spread silently through shared spaces and staff hands. Managing MDROs in long-term care homes,

Every dental instrument that contacts mucous membranes or breaks the skin barrier carries a transmission risk if not reprocessed correctly. The choice between steam sterilization and chemical disinfection is not a matter of preference. It is a clinical and regulatory decision governed by instrument classification, material compatibility, and Public Health Ontario standards. Getting this wrong

Infection prevention in childcare settings carries consequences that extend far beyond regulatory compliance. Children under five have developing immune systems, making daycares one of the highest-risk environments for rapid pathogen transmission. Public Health Ontario has established clear IPAC guidelines that licensed childcare operators must follow, yet many facilities still have critical gaps in their day-to-day

Veterinary hospitals occupy a unique and often underappreciated position in the infection prevention landscape. They are healthcare facilities where both the patients and the pathogens differ fundamentally from the human healthcare environment, and where the risk of zoonotic disease transmission from animal to human is a daily operational reality. Zoonotic disease prevention requires a specialized

An unannounced RHRA inspection is one of the most stressful events a retirement home operator can face, and the homes that navigate it with confidence are not those that happened to have everything in order by coincidence on the day the inspector arrived. They are the homes that have built operational systems strong enough to

If your Ontario long-term care home has received IPAC funding and the expiry date is approaching, the decisions you make in the coming weeks will determine whether that investment produces lasting compliance value or becomes a rushed, poorly documented expenditure that satisfies neither the funder’s requirements nor your home’s actual infection prevention needs. Many LTC