Hospital infection prevention, Rome
I’m Małgorzata Wachocka. For seventeen years I have worked inside one of Italy’s largest university hospitals, turning infection-prevention rules into what really happens on the ward.
Expertise
Patients meet water, air, surfaces, devices and hands all at once. Most hospitals manage them in separate silos. I look at them together, and at the people who make them safe every day.
Legionella and water safety
Legionella risk lives in pipes, taps and showers long before it shows up in a patient. I help teams build surveillance that finds it early and turns sampling results into decisions.
Controlled rooms and building work
Operating theatres, controlled-contamination rooms and wards under renovation. I have monitored particles and fungal spores on live hospital building sites without stopping clinical care.
Environmental audit
Audits that check what is really cleaned, not what the schedule says. Sampling, feedback and a short list of fixes the ward can own.
Reprocessing workflows
Endoscopes and reusable devices pass through many hands. I build self-assessment checklists that close the gap between the written procedure and the bench.
Hand hygiene and gloves
Everyone knows the five moments. Fewer people do them every shift. My work looks at what actually changes behaviour: training, feedback and smarter glove use.
Select an area on the diagram.
Work with me
I work with a small number of organisations at a time, alongside my hospital and university roles.
Environmental and behavioural risk reviews, water safety and Legionella plans, hand-hygiene and glove programmes, training for infection-prevention teams.
Guest lectures, course modules and conference sessions built from real hospital cases, in Italian, English or Polish.
Independent clinical-workflow insight and customer education. No product endorsements, and every paid relationship is disclosed.
30 minutes to understand the rule, the ward or the habit you want to change.
A short review on site or remotely: documents, data and, where possible, the ward itself.
Clear priorities, owners and measures. Written for the people who will do it.
Check-ins, feedback and a second look, so change lasts beyond the first month.
“A result is only useful if it changes what someone does tomorrow morning.”
From my notes on five years of proactive environmental surveillance
Insights
Short pieces drawn from my published research and daily practice. New articles every month.
Five years of proactive environmental surveillance taught us that the best Legionella result is the one you get before anyone is ill.
Read the insight
We asked 542 colleagues what they know about hand hygiene. The answers show where training works and where it quietly fails.
Endoscope reprocessing fails in small, quiet steps. A self-assessment checklist built with experts helped three wards find them.
Teaching on the prevention health professions degree, Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, Rome. Still teaching today.
Prevention technician in the hospital hygiene team of Fondazione Policlinico Universitario A. Gemelli IRCCS: HAI surveillance, environmental audit, Legionella and water safety, indoor air, construction risk.
Co-author of the “Safety and Hygiene Packages” model for running a hospital hygiene service.
Led practical training and placements for the degree in prevention techniques in the environment and workplaces, until 2023.
Monitored particles and fungal spores during renovation on a ward caring for profoundly immunocompromised patients, with no interruption of care.
Published on the value of prevention professionals during COVID-19 in Frontiers in Public Health.
Co-authored the proactive environmental surveillance model and the endoscope reprocessing checklist.
Teaching coordinator of the first-level Master’s in Safety and Risk Management for Public Health at Università Cattolica.
Second author of a hospital-wide hand hygiene study. Co-supervised a Sapienza Master’s thesis on rapid Legionella diagnostics.
Alongside my hospital and university roles, I bring seventeen years of practice to organisations that want prevention to work on the ward, not just on paper.
Speaking and teaching
I have taught future prevention professionals since 2008. I speak to hospital teams, conferences and universities in Italian, English and Polish.
Why infection-prevention rules drift on the ward, and how to bring them back.
Water, air, surfaces, devices and hands, seen the way patients meet them: all at once.
What hand hygiene surveys reveal, and what to change in training.
Keeping construction dust and fungal spores away from vulnerable patients.
Publications
Co-authored with colleagues in hospital hygiene, infectious diseases and public health. All papers are listed on PubMed.
Front Public Health
Front Public Health
Healthcare (Basel)
Eur Rev Med Pharmacol Sci
Front Public HealthFirst author
Mediterr J Hematol Infect Dis
Ig Sanita Pubbl · in Italian
Ig Sanita Pubbl · in Italian
G Ital Med Lav Ergon · in Italian
Contact
I read every message myself and reply within a few working days.