Australian Guidelines for the Prevention and Control of Infection in Healthcare
The Australian Guidelines for the Prevention and Control of Infection in Health Care provide evidence-based recommendations about the critical aspects of infection prevention and control, focusing on core principles and priority areas for action. All health service organisations should consider the risk of transmission of infection and implement these recommendations according to their specific setting and circumstances.
There is a known issue with the display of Table A2.4 Use of transmission-based precautions in the PDF version of the guidelines. A PDF version of this table can be downloaded here or viewed in the HTML version of the Australian Guidelines for the Prevention and Control of Infection in Health Care on the NHMRC website that is available on the MAGICapp platform.
V11.25, which was published on 14 November 2024, includes updates to:
- Scope (of AICG) to include additional information about level of risk dependent on the environment and situation.
- Section 3.1.4 to ensure consistency with Standard AS 5369:2023, and to include new section for Traceability.
- Section 3.1.5 “Respiratory hygiene and cough etiquette” to provide additional information about risk assessment for patients presenting aerosol-generating behaviours.
- Section 3.2.4 “Airborne precautions”, Recommendation 27 to replace the ‘P2 Respirators’ heading with the heading ‘Particulate filtration respirators (PFR)’ and corresponding information
- Section 3.3 “Personal protective equipment (PPE)” to include information provided by the Therapeutic Goods Administration regarding regulation of PPE , information about risk assessments for PPE, and a new section on "Managing breaches in PPE".
- Section 3.5 “Applying standard and transmission-based precautions during procedures” to include a new subsection 3.5.4 “Aerosol-generating procedures (AGPs)”.
- Section 4.6.1 “Mechanisms for influencing healthcare associated infection through environmental design”, with regarding ventilation rate as per Standard AS 1668:2:2024.
- Section 5.11 “Examples of how to perform aseptic technique”, to include an updated Step 5 about recommended use of gloves for peripheral and central intravenous line access procedures
- Updated Table A2.5 in Section 6.4 to amend the SARS-CoV-2 information, and to include new entry for Mpox and corresponding infection type, transmission route, required precautions, duration of precautions, and additional comments.
For complete details of the updates made in October 2024, see Section 11, Amendments to the Guidelines.
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