Beating the Bug: Safeguarding Rehabilitation Success from Candida Auris

Session Description: Inpatient rehabilitation facilities aim to restore patient independence, but emerging infectious diseases pose challenges. This proposal presents a project that developed a specialized approach to enhance rehabilitation outcomes for Candida auris patients while adhering to infection control protocols. Some rehabilitation facilities provide group activities and hands-on therapy sessions, tasking the infection preventionists (IPs) to provide a safe environment for staff, patients, and visitors by reducing the transmission of organisms while still allowing patients to reap the benefits of a therapy setting.

Candida auris is a resistant pathogen linked to healthcare outbreaks, requiring strict contact isolation. In rehabilitation settings, this isolation restricts patients to their rooms, limiting access to therapy equipment and impacting rehabilitation goals.

During our presentation, we will relay our experience with C. auris and how we provided colonized patients with a dedicated space for therapy activities while eliminating transmission to other patients. The session will emphasize the critical role of collaboration among infection preventionists, hospital leadership, therapy staff, and admission teams in developing tailored infection control strategies that also support patient rehabilitation goals. This approach highlights the importance of innovative solutions in balancing patient care and infection prevention.

Over a 14-month time period, we had a total of twenty-five colonized C. auris patients admitted to our facility and not only were there no instances of in-facility transmission during this time, we discovered that a higher proportion of patients who received therapy in the dedicated gym achieved their mobility improvement goals compared to patients restricted to their room. We plan to provide the tools and resources used to achieve these results so that other IPs can successfully implement a similar process in their own facility.

This presentation will be valuable for IPs, rehabilitation therapists, and healthcare administrators seeking to optimize patient care in the face of emerging infectious diseases.