Bernadette Brennan is National Heroine of Infection Prevention
by Ken Roberts
Bernadette "Bernie" Brennan of Haddon Township has been selected as a 2009 heroine of infection prevention for her work at Voorhees Pediatric Facility.
Hero or heroine is defined as "a fiction or historical character who, in the face of danger or adversity, displays courage and the will for self-sacrifice." Bernie Brennan wages a quieter battle against unseen germs that threaten the young residents, most of whom live on ventilators and with tracheotomies, at the 119-bed Voorhees Pediatric Facility.
Brennan, a registered nurse, has served as a Certified Infection Control Practitioner at VPF since 2000. One of her major achievements has been the establishment of a Skin Integrity Program.
In addition, she developed a Skin Integrity and Wound Management Manual and provided complete instructions for the staff, which includes doctors, nurses and specialists. Thisprogram has been in place for 4 years and, since its inception, skin-relation infection rates have dropped from 14% to 1%.
Brennan presented this program at the APIC Builing Bridges Conference in Kentucky in September, 2006.
APIC (Association for Practitioners in Infection Control) is a national organization representing over 8,000 infection control practitioners, now referrred to as Infection Preventionists. It has been a tremendous honor to have been selected from this talented group. Bernie will receive the award at the 2009 APIC National Conference in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, in June.
She has been a nurse since 1969, when she graduated from the the Hahnemann Hospital School of Nursing. She had been a medical/surgical nurse, nursing supervisor and a nurse educator at Hahnemann and Graduate Hospitals in Philadelphia. She had also worked at Mediplex, Camden and Marlton and the VNA of Southern New Jersey as an infection control practitioner prior to her appointment as Infection Control Practitioner at VPF.
"The staff at VPF does amazing work and it's been a very rewarding and enlightening job," said Brennan, "We accept residents from all over the country who are medically fragile and technology dependent.
"We have children from birth to age 21 and we try to provide them with a normal life, within their limitations. We have six Bancroft Neuro-Health classrooms and bedside tutoring, and we have buses that transport some of our residents to various public and private schools.
We have a summer program called "WAVE" (Wonderful Adolescent Ventilator Excursion) in which the children spend a week housed at Stockton State College and are transported to Ocean City, including the beach and boardwalk. Doctors and nurses accompany them and it's a wonderful and meaningful experience for everyone. The children really look forward to this experience."
She said that VPF has many success stories.
Bernie's husband, Tony, is now retired. She was considering retirement this coming sommer, but she has now decided to continue to work a little longer because "I enjoy what I do so much."
|
|