Statutory and mandatory training · Level 2 to 3, all health and social care staff
Infection prevention and control
The chain of infection, what actually breaks it, and the habits that quietly do not.
- 3modules
- 6.0CPD hours
- 300guided minutes
- Freealways
About this course
Infection prevention is the most trained and least changed subject in health and social care. Nearly everybody can recite the five moments for hand hygiene. Observed compliance in published audits sits far below what those same people report, and the gap is not ignorance. It is habit, time pressure, and a set of practices that feel safe and are not.
This course teaches the mechanism rather than the poster. It covers the chain of infection and which links are actually breakable, standard precautions applied properly, the personal protective equipment sequence and the specific errors that make gloves more dangerous than bare hands, sharps and waste, spillage, isolation and cohorting, and the organisms that behave differently enough to change what you do: Clostridioides difficile, norovirus, MRSA and the respiratory viruses.
It closes on antimicrobial resistance, because the single most consequential infection control decision most care staff make is whether to press for an antibiotic that a patient does not need.
What you will be able to do
- Explain the chain of infection and identify the breakable links
- Apply standard precautions, including the five moments for hand hygiene
- Put on and remove personal protective equipment in the correct order
- Manage sharps, waste, linen and body fluid spillage safely
- Respond correctly to Clostridioides difficile, norovirus, MRSA and respiratory infection
- Recognise your own role in antimicrobial resistance
Modules
- 1 The chain of infection, standard precautions and hand hygiene 100 min study · 5 min script · 6 question knowledge check
- 2 Protective equipment, sharps, waste, linen and spillage 100 min study · 4 min script · 7 question knowledge check
- 3 Outbreaks, isolation, the organisms that behave differently, and resistance 100 min study · 5 min script · 7 question knowledge check
Assessment and certificate
Knowledge check after each module and a final assessment at 80 per cent, with unlimited attempts.
A free digital certificate showing 6 CPD hours with a verification code. It evidences knowledge. Practical technique, particularly hand hygiene and the removal of personal protective equipment, should be observed and signed off in your workplace, because both are failed most often by people who know the theory.
Questions
Are gloves safer than washing my hands?
No, and worn wrongly they are considerably more dangerous. Gloves become contaminated exactly as hands do, but they feel clean, so people wear one pair for several tasks and several people. Unnecessary glove use is associated with worse hand hygiene, not better, because the glove replaces the moment of washing rather than adding to it.
Why does alcohol gel not work for Clostridioides difficile or norovirus?
Alcohol destroys the membrane around many organisms. C. difficile forms a spore with a tough protective coat, and norovirus has a protein capsid rather than a lipid envelope, so neither is reliably killed by it. Both need soap and running water, where the mechanism is physical removal rather than chemical killing.
How long should hand washing actually take?
Around twenty seconds of contact with soap, followed by thorough drying, because wet hands transfer organisms far more readily than dry ones. The commonest failures are missed thumbs, fingertips and the backs of the hands, and drying that is abandoned halfway.