Lisa Snodgrass – Infection Prevention and Control Leadership at Faubourg

Lisa Snodgrass is one of many great people working at Shannex. In her role as Director, Clinical Practice, Lisa is responsible for ensuring that all residents, across our Enhanced Care, Retirement Living and Lifestyle Residences divisions, receive the highest quality of service and care. Lisa is certified in infection prevention and control and is the infection prevention and control lead for our COVID-19 response. This includes regularly updating and improving operating directives to ensure the safety of those living and working in our communities.

My name is Lisa Snodgrass, I am the director of Clinical Services for Shannex and I also oversee our Infection Prevention and Control Program. My responsibility, and the responsibility of my team, is to make sure that our residents are receiving the best care and that our staff have the most current, best practice information that they need to provide the quality care that our residents need and deserve.

I’m certified in Infection Prevention and Control through the Canadian Board of Infection and Control and Epidemiology. I think our safety measures really take into effect a full interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary approach. We look at building structures to be able to create isolation areas if we have to or create wide-open spaces with good ventilation systems that can be proactive and reactive in regard to managing illness and infection. We also have great training programs for our employees from the day they start their job, even before they start their jobs with us. They receive education through various platforms on how to properly wear PPE, how to select PPE and how to do a point of care risk assessment, so they know what they’re looking at to keep the residents and themselves safe.

The unique build of our homes enabled us to create these areas that could be separate from the rest of the community in that home so that if we had an individual who tested positive for COVID-19, they could move into a designated care area, and actually have the designated staff to look after them. Creating these designated care areas took so much work in the background, from human resources and finance, supplies, food and beverage service, maintenance…there was so much work that went into that, but the fact that we have all of those people working for us put us in a really unique place that we could say, “this is what we need to do, let’s make it happen,” and they all got together and did that.

We had set up an Infection Prevention and Control email that people could access so that they have an opportunity to ask questions and for us to be able to get back to them in a timely manner… and sometimes people would ask questions and other times they would just send a message of “Thank you.” Something so little, and I don’t know if they truly are aware that – you know your phone might ping in the middle of the night, and you would check, and it was a message saying thank you, and that meant more than anything. I know my colleagues and teammates would say the same thing.

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