Blood-Borne Infection Risk Assessment Unit

On July 7, 2004, the Minister of Health and Social Services, through the assistant deputy minister and the provincial director of public health, gave the Institut national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ) the mandate to create an assessment program to prevent the transmission of blood-borne infections in health care unit delivery.

This mandate was subsequent to a position statement submitted by the Collège des médecins du Québec (CMQ), in April 2004 in the document The Physician and Blood-borne Pathogens, and the opinion of the Association des hôpitaux du Québec (now the Association québécoise d’établissements de Santé et de Services sociaux), through guidelines given to hospitals in June 2005.

These two organizations recommended that an assessment program be put in place to ensure, for the benefit of a caregiver who carries a blood-borne infection, an assessment of the potential for transmission of an infection to a patient receiving his or her care and to make appropriate recommendations in terms of his or her practice.

The Blood-Borne Infection Risk Assessment Unit (Service d’évaluation des risques de transmission d’infection hématogène (SERTIH) has been available to infected caregivers since January 2005 and to infected students in the health care field since June 2006.