Public health alum Lindsay Fairbanks’ role is to stop infection before it starts

The best way to fight infection in a hospital setting is to keep it from happening in the first place.

That is the chief aim of Lindsay Fairbanks, an infection preventionist at Carilion Clinic in Roanoke.

Fairbanks is a 2023 graduate of the Master of Public Health (MPH) program at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine.

Changing course

Fairbanks, from Winchester, Virginia, first went to James Madison University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in health sciences and chronic illness. 

“Originally, I wanted to go into nursing,” Fairbanks said. “And then I kind of realized that I wanted to stray away from the clinical side but still wanted to be involved in health and medicine. Then I found the Virginia Tech MPH program, I saw that they had an infectious disease concentration and was immediately drawn to it as I've always been very interested in infectious disease.”

Virginia Tech's Public Health Program in the Department of Population Health Sciences is administered by the veterinary college in partnership with the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and is accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health.

The best infection is no infection 

Being an infection preventionist is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

“A very broad overview of what infection control does is that we try to prevent and stop hospital-associated infections from happening,” Fairbanks said. “We’re trying to prevent our patients from getting infections that can potentially be life-threatening.”

MRSA, Candida auris and clostridium difficile, also known as C. diff, are among the most common and dangerous infections that can endanger hospital patients.

Fairbanks and her colleagues in infection prevention are vigilant for any hint of these and other pathogens. 

“There’s constant surveillance,” Fairbanks said “We have so many different programs that are continuously pulling data from our electronic medical records. This data alerts us to different trends that we need to be on the lookout for.“

Outpatient focus

Fairbanks focuses on outpatient infection control in Carilion’s various outpatient clinics and the operating rooms and preoperative areas for outpatient surgery. 

“We look at the environment of care, and I do procedure observations on a weekly basis,” Fairbanks said. “I'm looking for opportunities to improve our care for patients and looking for certain things that could potentially be high risk for spread of infection that others may not be noticing.” 

The goal is to have no infections, but Fairbanks’ team investigates promptly if infections do occur with an eye toward finding out the source of spread and how to stop it.

Educate, educate, educate

Fairbanks said it is sometimes difficult to get medical personnel with decades of experience to change learned procedures and acquired habits when new ways are found to reduce the spread of infection.

“I think our biggest challenge is just being able to actually change the practices of people who are on the front lines, who do this stuff every day and get in the habit of doing things in certain ways,” Fairbanks said. “Being able to make those changes in practice is probably the biggest challenge that we face. There’s more and more on their professional plates that they're having to remember to do every single day. And so eventually, it can become too much to remember and leads to slips in practice. We have to be creative and find new ways to reach people and make sure our frontline staff are up to date on the best practices. 

“So we educate, we educate, we educate.”