Consultant Spotlight: Sheila Shipley, DNP, RN, CIC, AL-CIP, FAPIC, EBP-CH
A nurse opens a patient record and sees a history of a multidrug-resistant organism (MDRO). A new culture has been ordered. What happens next?
For APIC Consulting consultant Sheila Shipley, DNP, RN, CIC, AL-CIP, FAPIC, EBP-CH, that moment says a great deal about how an infection prevention program functions in practice. Do staff recognize the significance of the history? Do they know what the facility’s transmission-based precautions process requires? Does action happen consistently, or does it depend on who is working that shift?
After 20 years in infection prevention across acute care, ambulatory, and behavioral health settings, Sheila keeps coming back to the connection between awareness and follow-through.
Meet Sheila Shipley
Sheila describes her greatest impact as an infection preventionist simply: “empowering others to identify infection prevention issues and implement improvement initiatives.”
Infection prevention and control reaches well beyond the IPC department. Decisions made by nursing, clinical teams, ancillary departments, leaders, and other staff can affect whether infection prevention practices are implemented consistently throughout an organization. As Sheila puts it:
“Infection prevention impacts the entire organization: all patients, visitors, and healthcare workers.”
Her approach centers on helping people recognize where infection prevention and control fits into their own work and giving teams a practical path to improve what happens at the facility level.
Why Timely MDRO Precautions Stand Out
When asked to identify a common infection prevention gap, Sheila pointed to an extremely specific one: “lack of awareness about the significance of timely isolation precautions in minimizing the risk of MDRO transmission.”
Surprisingly, this is an operational problem as much as an educational one. A facility can have an established transmission-based precautions policy and still need to examine what happens when staff encounter MDRO history during routine care.
Does everyone know what the policy requires? Is responsibility clear? Can the process hold up across different units and shifts?
Those are the kinds of questions Sheila pays attention to.
What She Looks for First
When Sheila enters a facility for the first time, one of her immediate priorities is compliance with transmission-based precautions.
That gives leaders a useful place to start when examining their own programs.
| Area to Examine | Question to Ask |
| Recognition |
Can staff identify information in the record that may affect transmission-based precautions?
|
| Policy knowledge |
Can staff explain what the facility requires when isolation status or MDRO history becomes relevant?
|
| Follow-through |
Does the expected action happen consistently at the unit level?
|
| Communication |
Is the information shared clearly among the people involved in the patient’s care?
|
The goal is to gain visibility into whether staff can translate that policy into the expected action during patient care.
What Integrated IPC Practice Looks Like: Recognizing MDRO Risk Early
Sheila’s answer to this question may be the clearest description of her approach.
An example of integrated practice is one in which a nurse reviews a patient record, recognizes a history of an MDRO, and places the patient on isolation precautions when a culture is ordered rather than waiting for the result.
It is a small operational moment, but it reflects several things working together: awareness, staff knowledge, confidence to act, and a process that has become part of routine care.
For an IPC program, those moments are worth examining because they show whether infection prevention practices are functioning where they ultimately need to during care delivery.
Why Multidisciplinary Engagement Matters
One lesson from the field continues to shape Sheila’s work:
“Multidisciplinary engagement is crucial for implementing and sustaining improvement initiatives.”
An infection preventionist can identify a gap, develop guidance, and educate staff. Sustaining an improvement, however, usually involves the people responsible for implementing the process every day.
For leaders reviewing an IPC initiative, this raises another useful question: Who needs to be involved in sustaining this change after the initial education, audit, or project is finished?
The answer is likely to extend well beyond the infection prevention team.
What Healthcare Leaders Can Check Now
Sheila’s perspective offers a practical exercise for organizations working on MDRO prevention.
Choose one point in your transmission-based precautions process and follow it from recognition through action. Check:
- What information staff are expected to recognize.
- What your facility policy tells them to do next.
- Whether responsibility for initiating the next step is clear.
- How that information is communicated during handoffs.
- Whether the process works consistently across the settings or units where patients receive care.
If there is a gap, Sheila’s experience suggests that the solution should involve the people who carry out the process as well as the IPC department.
Building Improvement Around the Facility
Sheila wants clients to leave an engagement feeling more confident in their ability to implement improvement initiatives specific to the needs of their facilities.
Infection prevention and control work must function inside the staffing structure, workflows, patient population, and operational constraints of the organization using it.
The most useful improvement work starts with what is happening in the facility and builds from there.
For Sheila, stakeholder involvement is central to that work, particularly as organizations confront MDRO risk across different healthcare settings.
“Multidrug-resistant organisms are a global threat to patients across all healthcare settings,” she says. “We must work harder to engage every stakeholder for infection prevention efforts to be successful.”
Experienced IPC Support When the Work Requires It
Consultants in the APIC Consulting network bring specialized infection prevention and control experience from healthcare settings where these operational challenges occur every day. Sheila’s perspective is one example of what that experience can look like in practice: observing how transmission-based precautions are implemented, involving the people responsible for the work, and helping facilities build improvement efforts around their own needs.
To discuss an infection prevention challenge at your organization, connect with APIC Consulting.